On the Quakeone forums there's been a decent amount of work put into finding most of the textures necessary for Arcane dimensions levels. For the most part this is all good but Some monster textures provided were not working as expected, and also there were many monsters without hi-def skins - I'd say roughly half. So I decided to use magic. And by magic I mean resampling the original lo-definition skins using CUDA and a neural net fed by high-resolution images, to interpolate between the pixels and generate the needed details. This is simpler than it sounds - with the right equipment. Waifu2x is an algorithm which does exactly this, using an nvidia GPU. I've used it in the past to upscale a C++-generated music film I made from SD to 4k, which can be downloaded here.
Getting the skins out of AD in the first place is not exactly ideal - for those who wish to do in in the future, the process is as follows: download blender, then the quake MDL import plugin and install the plugin by extracting it to blenders addon folder, then going to preferences, addons, searching for 'quake'. After that you import the .mdl (quake model) file in question, go to the texture and save it out. Then use Waifu2x with the UpRGB model to resize the images to 10x their original size, then downsize them in photoshop or similar to a nice power-of-two size (to play nice with older graphics cards).
Here's a demonstration - original texture (256x256):
Waifu2x Upscaled texture (1024x1024):
Without any personal art editing, just algorithms. Pretty cool huh? So then I decided to do this for almost every model in AD - 255 textures in total (most objects have multiple textures). Did it take a while? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes.
In some cases the generated textures ended up looking better than high-res textures people had custom-designed for AD - take this skullwiz upsample, compared to the HD texture someone had developed:
Although in some ways it looks like the custom skin should be better, in-game the upsample looks better due to the more distinctive lines. Pretty much a success. Of course it doesn't always work out, and in those cases I did a bit of photoshopping and editing with preexisting HD skins to make the old skins look better. Such as this guard texture developed from the original AD guard texture, and one of seanstar's skins:
The results do look nice.
Hopefully one day there can be a unified all-in-one (environment/enemy/models) HD pack for Arcane Dimensions.
That's the plan :)
Awesome, that's the way to go
You are doing God's Work, Sir. Or Hastur's.
Wow, cant wait to play this again