Updated carpet textures

[AluminumHaste]

EDIT: Ignore the FPS counter, I'm using 8xAA for the screenshots.

For the past year or so I've been working on increasing the quality of the carpet textures. Some of them are really REALLY low res. There's some that are actually 128px X 256px. They look really bad in game, but back then, we took what we could get.

So using various tools including AI upscaling and hand crafting parts of the textures in photoshop, I think I'm at a point that I'm getting close to a good workflow.

These won't be replacements for the current textures, but will be sat alongside the low res ones. They have been used in almost every mission in different ways, sometimes in non conventional ways, and I don't want to break the aesthetics of the current missions. They will show up as _HD in DarkRadiant's texture browser.

Here's what I have so far. (Click on the images to see their fullsize)

 

Here are some side by sides:

 

Here's the images on imgur https://imgur.com/a/2G0f5ZF

https://imgur.com/a/2G0f5ZF

[OrbWeaver]

On 6/4/2021 at 5:04 PM, AluminumHaste said:

These won't be replacements for the current textures, but will be sat alongside the low res ones. They have been used in almost every mission in different ways, sometimes in non conventional ways, and I don't want to break the aesthetics of the current missions.

Is it really possible to break existing missions just by providing higher-res replacements of existing textures which are otherwise identical in terms of pattern and appearance? I suppose there might be problems if an artist has done something really weird like zooming into particular pixels to colour part of a model, but that seems an unlikely use case. Increasing asset resolution seems like the sort of safe change that the mod team should be able to make without much objection.

The danger of having separate versions (other than a slight increase in total mod size) is that mappers might not notice or realise that there are specific "HD" versions that they need to select, and inadvertently release a new map using needlessly low-res textures.

[AluminumHaste]

It's not straight up higher res. I've had to manually adjust some of the textures to make them better. The red carpet which is very popular, I completely remade the end part.

So while the transition replacement is drop in:

 

The end one isn't:

 

 

So I can't just replace the existing one, as it will break it for all maps that use that texture.

The others, the changes are much more subtle, usually involves warping the image in photoshop to get the parts of the texture better aligned, but different enough.
There are some mappers who prefer the low res look, Kingsal being one of them.

[AluminumHaste]

I also had the scale wrong on the red carpet end piece. It's actually this size:

So can't just replace it, it's different dimensions.

Another problem I don't know if I'm going to bother fixing, is that some of the carpet textures don't align at all, as this is how they are originally uploaded to TDM,
I can see how the middle transition texture was made from parts of the end texture, but they don't quite line up.

 

 

[AluminumHaste]

BTW, is non power of 2 still an issue with modern hardware?

I'm trying to recreate this carpet texture into something more usable, but I can't get it square and work right.

EDIT: I mean the texture works fine in game, but DarkRadiant shows black texture in render view, I'm assuming it's because it's np2

 

EDIT: Hmm, might still be problematic with mipmaps:

Most of modern GPUs support non-power of two (NPOT) textures and handle them well. Performance drop is quite little. But there are few problems to consider:

• When using NPOT texture it takes more space in RAM, just like next-sized POT texture. Technically you just waste the space that could be used to put something in there;

• NPOT textures may be handled noticeably slower (in OpenGL 2.1 I had up to 30% performance drop) compared to POT of next size;

• Older GPUs and on-board/on-chip GPUs are not so advanced, they often support NPOT textures, but support is quite slow and clumsy;

• Even older GPUs may refuse to accept/display NPOT textures at all;

• There could be edging artifacts caused by mip-map interpolation, your 25x25 texture might have a black fringe where pixels were added to stuff it to 32x32 size.

[OrbWeaver]

Note that non-power-of-two and non-square are two different things. In general it's never really been a problem (AFAIK) to have non-square textures that use powers of two for each side (e.g. 1024x512, 256x8 etc), and you might well find that you can fit your textures into this scheme.

There's also a difference between non-power-of-two and not-a-multiple-of-anything-sane — you can probably get away with 768x768 (not a power of two, but still a multiple of 256) but I really wouldn't try 757x343 or something weird like that.

In any case, if DR is showing a black texture and there is definitely nothing wrong with the material def or texture itself, that should be reported as a bug I think. If the GPU supports it then DR should too.

[AluminumHaste]

So 2048x1536 is ok?

[OrbWeaver]

Probably — I imagine many video playback applications are using textures around that size. But it would need testing of course.

[thebigh]

These look terrific, BTW. Your hard work is really paying off.

[kingsal]

4 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

There are some mappers who prefer the low res look, Kingsal being one of them.

I don’t necessary prefer a low res look, but a clean, less noisy look.  Many of the dark mods  normal maps were made incorrectly and add a lot of high frequency detail and noise.
 

 It would actually be beneficial to have more  visually different carpet textures rather than HD versions of the current ones.  I would suggest releasing these as a “texture pack” to the community to use rather than increasing the mod size and creating the _HD convention.

[AluminumHaste]

Sorry, that's what I meant. To me, missing normal maps or low res normal maps look yucky. But I also understand your POV too with too noisy, you can get awful texture shimmering.

[kingsal]

12 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:

Sorry, that's what I meant. To me, missing normal maps or low res normal maps look yucky. But I also understand your POV too with too noisy, you can get awful texture shimmering.

Yeah exactly, It also depends on the program used to generate the normals. A lot of "auto generating" programs have heavy default settings and do weird things.

I do think these HD version look good and I wonder really how much trouble it would cause replacing the old ones. The risky thing here is like you said, these are used in tons and tons of missions so the potential for trouble is high.

[AluminumHaste]

I also make sure to always normalize the normalmaps, and adjust it to make sense for the texture. There's no a reason a sanded, polished wood surface should have lots of bumps that contour to the wood grain, etc.

But carpets have a LOT of texture to them, especially old style carpets, so the missing or bad normal maps really stood out.

And I just checked, the original carpet textures were 512x256, that's just a little bit bigger than the thumbnails used in Dark Radiant lol. Now, you're taking that tiny image and stretching it across most of your screen, it's going to look awful.

Also, it's not 2006 anymore, we can get away with larger textures.

[Filizitas]

I like the new carpets but maybe they need more patterns and variations. And what about round carpets

[thebigh]

 

58 minutes ago, Filizitas said:

And what about round carpets

Oh I agree. That one yellow straw rug sees a lot of use XD.

[AluminumHaste]

Sure, this is first and foremost an effort to make high res versions of what we already have.

After that, I'll look into making new ones.

[AluminumHaste]

Ugh, spent a week redoing these carpets by hand:

 

Now I just have to get rid of the seam between them, I think it's a photoshop 2020 glitch.

EDIT: You can see how the original texture didn't line up:

[MirceaKitsune]

They indeed look so much better. I'm using almost all of those carpet textures in my FM's so needless to say I'm on board with the idea.

Any hope on the developers agreeing to replace the originals with those updated versions? Even scaled at 1024px or 2048px if memory is a problem?

[AluminumHaste]

I explained earlier that I can't overwrite the originals, as the HD ones are actually different. Some of them I've had to remake by hand, and some are different dimensions.

[MirceaKitsune]

1 hour ago, AluminumHaste said:

I explained earlier that I can't overwrite the originals, as the HD ones are actually different. Some of them I've had to remake by hand, and some are different dimensions.

Oh, that is correct: If a texture has a different resolution (even if proportions are the same) it may get rescaled... at least DarkRadiant indicates so, 0.25 can mean one scale for a 1024 x 1024 texture but twice for 2048 x 2048. In that case existing FM's would get broken so yeah. I wonder if they can be included in a different subdirectory then.

[OrbWeaver]

As long as the aspect ratio is the same, changing texture resolution alone should not break existing FMs. The compiled map (along with all models) will be storing texture coordinates as 0 - 1 normalised UV coordinates, which don't care about texture resolution.

I believe the problem @AluminumHaste is referring to is that the actual visual alignment of certain textures has been changed, which means that they would need to be reapplied manually in DR by the mapper. This would make a direct image replacement unsafe.

[stgatilov]

Regarding these committed assets.

Why are normalmaps saved in BC3_UNORM format?
As far as I understand, it is DXT5, which is DXT1 color + high-quality alpha blocks.
And normal map does not need any alpha at all.

You can use RGTC (BC5) for high-quality normal map with the same size, or DXT1 (BC1) for same quality but 2x less size.

[stgatilov]

Also I noticed this white line on the testmap:

It looks quite bad from distance, like a 1-pixel aliased line.
Is this an issue in the testmap itself?

[AluminumHaste]

Will look at it later. Work starts in a few hours

[AluminumHaste]

In my experience dx1 had blocky compression artifacting, which is really bad for normalmaps. I'll redo them as rtgc.

The Nvidia tool says it uses 6:1 compression ratio for dx1, and dx3/5 is 4:1 ratio, which is higher quality as DDS compression is lossy.