Not much progress this week thanks to the SQL attacks across the web, no fun googling when every other page downloads a fake antiviral!

So I did some game testing brought my fighter over from my laptop, he thought his destiny was to be a knight in shining armor but I told him he needs to start small and patrol the flowers to keep them safe for the alchemists! I spent half a day wondering why my textures were crashing on cell switches; after randomly swapping out mods and resaving it stopped doing that so it was just usual save CTDs from mod switches. The textures look improved over vanilla in the game but lose some sharpness - expected since pixel matching would be impossible considered the varied scaling and rotations. It look like it does in a graphics tool when an angular rotation is done, the pixel matching is lost and it slightly blurs. Way to deal with that would be 8x8 instead of 4x4 sizing- not sure if graphics cards could handle it nor if I could find training library pics at that scale. I chose 4x4 because that means clouds will be 2kx2k.

Turns out GIMP DDS plugin has problems in game - the mipmaps are not being gamma corrected properly and turn black when you move away, open source but I did not see the problem in the code - probably a C * issue that needs debugging. So redid everything using the Nvidia DDS utilities instead and all is well. Except it has a DX1 color only bug, it insists on including the alpha channel to fix a rounding error it has making pure blacks into cyan and correcting it by making those pixels transparent. So far I have not noticed the black holes in the game, but will inspect carefully. Nvidia has an option to merge seperate mipmaps into one texture so in theory I could make them myself if there are such issues - but I think it is in the color compression code to DDS and not in the scaling as it happens in the top level mipmap too.

Found a huge government plant gallery so am spending my tax dollars browsing it, have some good lichens, ferns, and looking for stoneflowers and gold kanet's but many pics left to pick thru. Also working on hackle-lo - it is a combo of tabacco and dead yucca! I should be halfway done with flora this weekend, next will be bitter coast since so many of the flora are also BC plants, and my fighter needs to be hunting crabs and beetles before venturing onto the roads again!

Awesome project.

Could we have a few more screenshots please?
The screenshots you have posted looked really nice, but you have posted only 2.

Actually my avatar is the down-sized marshmerrow - you can't see any details because it is so small but you can see it is same as vanilla that way. Was the first one I did thus why it is my avatar.

I tried to get some screenies in-game - but they come out dark like gamma is being ignored and the dialog box pops up covering my pic saying I don't have the .ini set when I in fact do. I use MGE with the screenshot function mapped to the print screen key - it works but just not useable!

the ini files can be found in 2 seperate folders. some people accidently set the wrong one (the one in your main folder) when trying enable screenshots. use youre pc's search function to track all the ini's down and change them all.

Sparing no details...

http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/2439/vhdfernbits.png

Since the source is very pixelated rather than photographic textures like the prior snapshots, there is only so much that can be done without adding anything that makes the mip-maps no longer vanilla and possibly creating seams in tiled textures.

In all the texture packs I downloaded, they have photoshopped a similar photo, while certainly a way to get more details the colors and contrast are never exactly the same. Pics always seem to give the land a cut and paste feel to the world. Or if a pic is not available it gets upscaled then photoshopped to the point I cannot even tell what it was anymore and it would have been better to leave it alone!

Feeding fern leaves into the engine now...1k images always take a while!

Keep it up! Even with these blurrier ones there is a HUGE difference in the textures so for those of us who like the feel of vanilla but would like some clearer textures this is a great effort. I can't wait to see it.

For MGE screenshots, just map the key to something other than print screen and the message goes away.

This project is insanely awesome! I've always wanted the original feel of the game, with clearer textures.

Good Luck

I am sure there is a logical explanation why you can't map it to the logical key - but DOH!

Made the mistake of trying to do two 256->1k textures at once - ran out of swap and started over last nite on just one. Been at it all night and is only on the 4th training image. So I know where my wall is now. I also have the Linux Matlab that was 64b - but the student license refused to install it even though they released it. I think there is a Matlab/XP 3GB patch if this motherboard can take it - so that will be my first upgrade.

If you need training images, I would suggest looking through cgtextures.com for images. Best place to to get textures for working with. Its not truely comprehensive, but it does cover a huge range of stuff.

Oh yea, someone commented earlier about how these look similiar to what darknut does with textures. In one of my experimentations, I actually figured out a way to make textures in an almost identical look to what he does; it turned out to be one of the most simplistic things, I was dumbfounded by how simple it was(at least on the 2 textures I tried, didnt try any more then that though). I feel like an idiot for not writing it down now because I figured I would remember it but guess not. haha Perhaps I should go play around and remember it again.

Great work yarnevk
http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/6962/zzzn.jpg

Yes there are a lot of photoshop plug-in tricks one can use to artificially sharpen edges or do bump-mapping or do contrast stretching to fool the eye. Many of the texture packs have used that. The larger the screen the more annoying these tricks become because the psychovisual basis for the tricks no longer apply - you begin to see the outlines around things, the loss of color, etc.

For every example that looks great I can point to a counter example - the blank anther flower that someone used all the tricks to the point it no longer looks like a flower with organic spots - flowers do not have stucco like texture they just have organic patterns! Or the grass that was so highly processed it had black and white snow all over it - never seen my yard look like that unless it was flecked with snow - it is always shades of natural green and brown. I want my leaves to look like natural leaves and not artistically enhanced black and white outlines!

With this approach learning from natural images it constrains itself only to do what was in the higher resolution natural image.

But for someone who has their contrast and color controls centered on their TV so they can see the movie as it was filmed - someone else (my ex-wife!) has to have them cranked all the way up! Ditto for radio controls in cars - more bass more treble but no mids....

Not sure what you are doing, I am too lazy to read enough in order to understand. But the results of your work are clear, it is an good improvement and they do retain the origional look and feel. Well done and I hope you have the patience to complete this.

I think iemboss is a great tool to bring out more details from low res textures, or overall just making a hires texture even more detailed (or just very different from how it originally looked). I use it a lot.

http://piclair.com/data/d390b.jpg i think it looks more "interesting", your and the original dds ( http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/1057/vhdkreshweed.png ) comes off as a little too flat.

I upscaled the dds, not using any special upscaling method, just the built-in photoshop one, then applying one of my presets in iemboss (took me a few seconds to find a good one for this particular texture + had to change the direction of the light a little).

Your method seems cool though! More true to the original look of the texture, it's more pure. I'm not sure it's always the best option though, the textures are often not that great imo, i dont think the original texture creator(s) is comparable to a famous painter or anything, so i don't see the point in preserving them 100%. If someone wants the original look for pure nostalgic reasons, then he probably would want the blurriness to go with it.. Just my opinion ofc

Yeah, i agree thats looking more interesting, but i think yarnevk just want to stay on vanila looking, but just with more quality look.

Not a fan of baking lighting into textures. Just try to find a photo of a leaf with such extreme highlite and shadow that is not artistically processed - it simply is not natural and I think even with a professionals photographers light setup it would be hard to even get such a photo - searching for training images I did not get anything like that at all - if I had found one at all mine would look like yours because the details are learned.

But even if you consider your reinterpreted art is better than vanilla art - then forgot real photos it is all just art. Baking lighting into textures always looks really wierd in game even if it looks great outside game because the hilite and shadow cannot follow the lighting of the game, a "flat" texture with no lighting plays better with all the other textures. A better approach would be using detail maps which can follow game lighting (if the videocard can handle that approach).

Richer Textures used the photoshop plug-in approach though at vanilla resolution and not upsizing interpolation, it took months of manual work because one approach cannot work for every texture thus automation is not possible. Embossing a leaf may work (aside from game vs. texture lighting issue) because it has that type of texture but there is no such thing as an embossed flower petal - if you actually tried to emboss a petal it would probably rip!

BTW I am a fan of your grass - not entirely sure how well vanilla grass textures will work with my technique as they are indeed a blurry mess to begin with and maybe the 3D or photo textures will still be preferred - but getting grass training images will be easy so will see what happens.

That is why I called it 'Vanilla' HD - like my avatar - if the mip-map or thumbnail preview does not look the same - I failed. Theoretically with this approach it is very possible I am reconstructing the higher-rez texture that the released texture was down-sized from when they figured out the game will not fit onto the CD! Though when this same approach is used for faces it is called hallucination - while you can guarantee that your hi-rez interpretation will down-size and match the lo-rez source - you cannot guarantee the reverse. It is very scary they are using such a hallucination on bio-metric ID systems to find the bad guys but the research journals are full of this very thing what with homeland security funding being available.

All of this detailed information gets ripped into the classification of the training image database (for hackle-lo I have only 5 1kx1k training pics of dead dirty yucca leaves- the training database is over a GB and took a half day to build after sifting thru all the images getting rid of the noisy compressed ones. It is going on two days and I have yet to spit out a .dds - right now the CPU is not running because it is paging (maybe because I have google, email, and Gimp all open too)

I spent a lot of time to make sure I meet the constraint of the moniker 'Vanilla' when applying what is learned from the database - but it literally is a trivial line of code for me to scale what was learned and crank it up so a Darker or Vivid or Cranked Morrowind versions just becomes a matter of compile time once the training classifications are done. But I have to satisfy what I want for myself first - which is Vanilla!

And for me Vanilla means it mip-maps the same - so lets see how your ZZZZ "enhancement" holds up.

Taking it back to vanilla resolution (Gimp sinc downsized, then zoomed it back up to blocky pixels for an easier pixel by pixel compare)

http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/144/zzznmipmap4.jpg

http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/5549/zzznmipmap16.jpg

interestnig - you can still see the stem of the leaf in Vanilla and Vanilla HD even though it is 16x downsized- kinda gets broken up on the ZZZZ image enhancement.

The intent of Vanilla HD is it just focuses the lens clearer than vanilla when you get close - and it IS vanilla when you are not close...if someone finds a stray pixel in mine - I will blame it on GIMP as these are not the actual dds mip-maps - but if anyone knows a good extractor that CAN show mip-maps as one image I could use it for just such testing - since I am not actually ripping the vanilla mip-maps but downsizing and compressing again if there are bad pixels it indicates a bug somewhere in my code or Nvidia's code - or maybe just differences in mipmap filter options used.

I have generally avoided the texture sites because of their restrictive downloading policies that result in bans - but sofar on google and botany databases have rejected a lot of pics for camera or compression noise or the scale did not match. Until I start compiling the training library it is really hard to be initially selective - so mass downloading works best for me even though they don't like it.

They have a huge selection of leaves though - I have shared my leaf database across textures just because good pics are hard to find - who in their right mind is out there taking leaf pictures after all besides botanists - and a lot of them need to upgrade to good megapixel cameras.

So if someone sees a perfect match for adding details to something on my list on the texture sites - please point it out even if it is crossed off - I can always retrain....

The only time the engine can calculate 100% proper lightning is if the verticies of the object follows the exact shape of the texture, which is almost never the case. Take a brick wall for example, some bricks in the texture stands out, some are sunken in, some places has cracks, holes etc. That would be a very complex model with thousands of verticies, and that is not the case in Morrowind, lightning will be cast flat onto it, it wont take the cracks or holes into account, so it wont be natural at all. Unforunately bump maps doesnt work good in Morrowind either.

Light and shadows bounces off from everywhere in our surroundings, so it's often much too complex for us to quickly calculate as "fake" (obviously we'll notice it directly if it's really over-the-top plain wrong). If a leaf texture for example is just flat, without depth or any kind of lightning or shading, and light from the engine is just casted flat onto it, i'd say we take notice more and dismiss it as "fake", because it's just not how things look normally, it would have a bit of depth and certainly shadows.


If it's a project that someday will be finished i'll absolutely try it, not sure at this point if i would be that impressed by the results. To me it sounds too scientific and not creative enough when it comes to really improving the look of the game, but i'll gladly be proven wrong My suggestion would be to texture a complete model with this method and make screenshots comparisons, see if you think it's a good enough improvement over vanilla (vs time you have to spend on this - because it does sound like a really vast project).

why

Time is not an issue - either I am playing the game - or I am modding it. Hobbies are supposed to be time wasters - not like I am getting paid to get it done on time! But because much of it is automated it can be worked on while I am sleeping or at work. The only manual part is finding training images.

I was not talking about bump maps or mesh improvements - here is the thread on http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/805977-detail-maps/page__p__11716091#entry11716091 The posts by Westly are most informative.

Do you have a way to view the spectra map for the spatial frequency coefficients? The filter you used has severe aliasing artifiacts, the notch frequencies that most filters have in high frequencies are appearing in the low frequencies - they got aliased down. You do not notice it in the hi-rez version because all the details are hiding it - but there are holes in the spatial frequency map that affect even the smallest of mip-maps.

In artistic terms the filter changed the stem from a broad paint brush to a very fine ink pen, and that detail is lost in the mip-maps - even though it is a major feature of the texture. The mip-maps should look like an increase in focus as you get closer.

but its useless

Decided to give it a try and downloaded a yellow flower that could be inspiration for gold kanet - I had searched all weekend for a good match with no luck. Very clean details. So if they are that clean maybe I don't need to be throwing out a ton of downloads, as long as I only look for the one I am working on next I should stay under their ban limits. Thanks for the pointer - it seems a lot of pros use that site as a resource.

It took nearly three days for the dead hackle lo leaves - clearly 1GB training library is too much for my old computer to handle.

I am not happy with the result - but I guess it depends on what people think this original texture is?

http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/4548/txhacklelo02.jpg

To me this looks like the dead leaves speckled with dirt at the base of a yucca plant - the diseased leaves are usually yellowish green with dark circular spots that look burnt - like a kid learning to color it went overboard and turned it into a highly detailed leopard print. I think it drew the wrong thing - but maybe it is just more creative than me? The algorithm is intentionally colorblind processing each RGB plane (actually CIELUV/XYZ) seperately -as color matching requirements would greatly reduce the possibility of adding details. I think the original is just dirt specks and I should toss the diseased leaves I gave it to learn from to cut down the training library to size and try again?

http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/4548/txhacklelo02.jpg