LagBeam wrote: ↑Sat Aug 22, 2020 8:45 am
ZettoNaender, thank you for finalizing my idea of porting P5R portraits and merging them with Rexis's 4K mod (after i've seen Chlorophylls mod and still currently use it).
However, I have number of issues or, rather, questions regarding your work.
- Starting with the harsh stuff - why your portraits are kinda on lower-quality side, especially during animations? I know it's easy to talk, but Rexis's 4K mod and his portraits are very detailed and consistent in quality during animations.
- What source images have you used? Ones from P5R backport mod posted here or you worked with PS4 images (in .GNF format)?
- Have you made any scripts to speed up your process? I'm asking it here because in P5R backport thread I have not received any additional info besides the sole fact.
- What implementation of Waifu2x have you used? I've just today stumbled on Waifu2x-Extension-GUI that provided some interesting results you may consider.
Now - why am I trying to brew some BS here - as I mentioned in P5R Bustup Backport
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=176&start=20#p2047 I am dabbling with idea of pulling PS4 bustups, converting them to editable form, upscaling and combining back to be used alongside Rexis's 4K mod. And, unfortunately I've hit some roadblocks.
These roadblocks are:
- I'm not good with scripting (just not a programmer myself, but can certainly try)
- I've managed to unpack .GNF portraits from PS4 version, but my tools sometimes (often) fail to fully export images, forcing me to drop image or try rebuilding it by hand.
- Up until now I had issues with artifacts using Waifu2x implementations but now I have some selection of "forks" to that project.
- I've recently fallen ill which even further slowed me down with any possible progress
I have a suggestion, or at least just an attempt to possibly strike some cooperation from you, or maybe get some information from Rexis or Chlorophylls:
How about joining forces to improve on this mod project? Since I'm the one complaining about stuff - I'm ready to receive the full bulk of the job, but I'm half stuck not having optimal tools for it - Scarlet-converter cuts out pieces of image in GNF->PNG conversion, etc.
To provide visual representation of "quality" issue I've spoken before - some links:
https://imgsli.com/MjA3NjM - Morgana Angry (where I noticed issues with animations and quality)
https://imgsli.com/MjA3NjQ - Ryuji Neutral
https://imgsli.com/MjA3NjU - Ryuji Smiling
To create my versions I've rebuilt full portraits with animated pieces - used RealSR-ncnn-vulkan Waifu2x implementation (from Waifu2x-Extension-GUI project from GitHub) - and, finally, using data from P5R Bustup Backport, made by Chlorophylls and Rexis, re-created and aligned my frames and animation pieces to bustup_param.dat from the same mod.
I've also tried to half-ass two videos with your mod active and with my work applied instead.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/zaa8feqd8s8dlpp/file and
http://www.mediafire.com/file/yv60p5t5gmt6lxw/file respectively.
I know those videos have some serious issues with size,length and consistency but it's better than nothing, I guess.
This is a really awesome detailed post you made, LagBeam! I'm all in for improving my work quality.
So back to topic, here are some info of what I did:
- I used the Portrait Backport mod from Chlorophylls's post as image source, containing the .bin files which, when unpacked contains the .dds files with 512px resolution (I believe this resolution is used for the original P5 PS3 portraits)
- For every .dds file, upscale it 2x to png, then upscale it again 2x to png, finally used imagemagick to resize to 75% and outputs a dds file.
I used waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan-20200606 for the upscale with the parameters -n 3 -s 2 for the upscale. I'm aware that the implementation has been updated since I used it, but according to the changelog it shouldn't have a different output with the older version (correct me if I'm wrong though).
After analyzing your post, I believe I've found a few things that may be the cause of the lower quality of my mod:
- You used PS4 Royal's as image source, can you try upscaling from the one posted by Chlorophylls? Does it produce a lower quality than the one you did? I would like a follow-up on this, considering I currently don't have the time to learn how to correctly convert the GNF from the PS4 files.
- The waifu2x ncnn-vulkan implementation apparently performs faster than caffe at the cost of a minor reduction in image quality. In your post you used RealSR instead of waifu2x for the upscale, right? I thought waifu2x is more appropriate for Persona 5's anime aesthetic than RealSR which should be the cause of the difference in output.
- Also I actually never touched the bustup parameter file since I thought it wouldn't need any adjusting since I analyzed the .bin from the 4K UI bustups and the original vanilla file which, for the bustups have the same structure just with different dds resolutions.
Again, thanks for the reply and I wish for a follow-up or a correction of my reasoning from you.