OT - AI Gigapixel

[MajorMagee]

I often upsize older aircraft textures from 1024 to 2048 to get rid of the visible pixelation, or even 4096 if there are fine details that I want to enhance. In the past I've done this using Photoshop's resizing function, increasing the size in 10% increments to allow it to smooth out the jaggies as best it could. It worked okay, but I was left with hours of smudge tool handwork to finish cleaning up the blockiness, and residual jaggies on diagonal lines.

Recently I acquired the newly released AI Gigapixel resizing tool by Topaz Labs, and the results are amazing. It was kinda slow but got me to a finished result far faster than all the hand work I had been doing. This week they released version 2.0 and increased the speed by a factor of 4x without reducing the quality of the conversion (60-90 seconds for our typical textures). The only annoyance is that it can't read dds files, so I have to convert them to jpg, or tiff first, and then convert it back once the upsizing is finished.

It's not cheap ($99), but I got it on discount for 20% off by attending one of their new release webinars. If anyone has a particular image file they would like enlarged send me a PM.

http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/t...apixel-review/

https://www.provideocoalition.com/a-...-intelligence/

https://www.provideocoalition.com/th...a-i-gigapixel/

[mongoose]

Sounds a great tool Andy.

[BorekS]

Looks like a very clever software

Converting to JPG, Andy? I hope with a zero compression only, otherwise it is another kind of degradation. Does support it PNG files btw?

[Shessi]

Hi Andy,
Thanks for the HU, looks a great tool.

I know this sounds an odd question, but does it also handle reducing image size/scaling whilst keeping that great quality?

And thanks for the offer, may take you up on that, if I don't get it.

Cheers

Shessi

[MajorMagee]

Yes, PNG as well. I've been using TIFFs to avoid adding compression artifacts, but one of the things it does very well is erase JPG artifacts.

It does not go in the other direction and I still have to rely on Photoshop for reducing file sizes when that might come up.

The third link I posted above has several examples from an airshow picture that gives you an idea of what it can do for upsizing CFS3 textures.

The ability to use these larger files because of our faster hard drives and bigger graphics cards has been a godsend for upgrading the fidelity of the simulation.

[MajorMagee]

What's nice is that it pretty much gets it right without needing to do any hand retouching. Anti-aliased borders, smoothed banding, and sharpened details, all in one quick step.

Before


After


It was pretty much designed for up-scaling old low-rez photos and enlarging cropped sections for printing, and it does a great job on those tasks as well when I compare it to Photoshop CS2.

[AnKor]

Wow! I see the tool smudged some rivets on yellow background, but other than that it looks excellent

[MajorMagee]

Yes, the rivets in low contrast areas tend to fade out, but that may not always be a bad thing if they look like they've been hidden under a layer of paint.

[mongoose]

So are you saying that one could take 2048 aircraft texture and up them to 4096 and 1024 to 2048 (? or 4096) with some ease using this tool ? BTW how would 4096 textures effect frame rates IYO?

[MajorMagee]

Yes, I've been upgrading textures for a few years now, and it's always been a painstaking process. This makes it a breeze.

On my system I've seen no issues or slow downs using high resolution aircraft textures up to 4096, but generally any of the newer 2048 textures don't need this sort of enhancement.

I have <CompositeAircraftTextureMaxDim val="4096"/> set in ConfigOverrides.xml otherwise the game can't take advantage of the higher resolution no matter how big the image is, and down scales the texture back down to the lower limit.

[mongoose]

This the link for purcase I assume.

https://topazlabs.com/ai-gigapixel/

[MajorMagee]

Yes, though you might want to find a discount code (like the one in the Northlight link) to avoid paying full price.

[MajorMagee]

I started using a slightly different setting, and it keeps more of the rivet detail without giving up the other benefits.

[ndicki]

I shall be watching this with considerable interest, if only because that skin is one of mine.....................

[MajorMagee]

The question came up about if this could be used on the landscape textures. I tried it on one of the smaller MAW textures, l_grass03.dds.

Clockwise from the top left is
128 x 128 (Original)
256 x 256 (200% enlargement from original)
512 x 512 (400% enlargement from original)
1024 x 1024 (400% enlargement from original, then 200% additional enlargement from that)



What's nice about the AI part of Gigapixel is the ability to create inferred detail in the texture. I suspect that with photorealistic tiles as a starting point this could turn out even better.

One thing that would need to be checked is if these enlargements would still tile together seamlessly.

[mongoose]

I'm glad you resurrected this thread. Have you actually used the higher res files yet? I am also wondering how they would work with the city dds files in the assets/cities folder. It seems they are 2048x2948 but when I fly over London for instance, they seem to be very poor resolution, one of the bad aspects of CFS3. Now I am assuming its these dds files I am seeing when flying over a city? (what's the difference between 'city1' and 'wincity1'?)

Also looking at things such as airbase outlines, are there different files use at different heights or are they used in a completely different context from the one I'm thinking of; namely just flying over them?

[MajorMagee]

They just released a major update today to version 4.0.0.

The biggest change for what I've been doing is that you can now control noise suppression and blur removal separately. There are 6 different levels of strength that can be applied for each one. This helps with fine tuning the impact is has on things like rivets and panel lines. You still need to balance keeping most of the fine detail with having it smooth out the jagged lines for you.

There are also two levels of AI that can be selected for a trade-off between quality and speed. They also let you set the level of dedicated GPU memory usage now.

[mongoose]

I'll have to check that out next week when I get home. Meanwhile I put it on my son's PC to upgrade all my bmp files for making dds and mos files re Deelen and Venlo. It doesn't like bmps so have to upgrade pngs or jpgs and then save as bmps.