Upscalling VC Skins with Neural Network

[Tobi0]

Hey everyone.

Some days ago PunkNoodle came to me in EAD with the idea of using Neural Networks to increase quality and resolution of VC skins. After seeing some examples of it I decided to give it a go.

I decided to start by downloading a RAISR based NN wrote in Python (More information about RAISR here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7744595). After downloading it had to be trained (The training consists of giving the NN high resolution images for it to downscale them and figure out the best way to reupscale them), so I just gave it a bunch of 4K images and hoped for the best.

The NN seemed to be single threaded so the training took a few hours to complete. After finishing I did the first test but the result wasn't good enough, it indeed looked less pixelated but also a little blurry. Then, Punk gave me a link to this post in Doomworld: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/99021-doom-neural-upscale-2x-v-10/.

I decided to try with some of the things the guy said (except for using Nvidia NGX because I don't have an RTX GPU). Downloaded Gigapixel AI and used it to upscale the images to 1024x2048 (from 128x256) and then downscale them to 512x1024 getting rid of some AI artifacts.

This is the result:





(Also thanks to Punk for the comparisons).

Here are all the skins done till now (12):

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kf2oixjswUSejd-LtnsB9RoiRZ-GLcIH?usp=sharing

If you want me to do another skins, just contact me via Discord and send me the files.

[Eazym4]

Great work 

[Tobi0]

Added red and blue taxist skins. (Same link)

[TrapHole.]

El del militar es mi skin favorito jaja, soy agustin.
Gracias estan buenisimos

[OmaRosh]

Wow nice results 
Didn't expect a NN would have such good results. I'd like to try it xD
Good job punky and tobi <3

[PunkNoodle]

To be exact all the work has been done by Tobi0. I had this idea and I remembered long time ago Tobi told me he was interested in neural networks so I asked him if he thought upscaling VC skins that way was possible.

[PunkNoodle]

Radon also contacted me, he attempted the same project with Gigapixel AI and upscaled all the skins 2x the original res, one year ago. Here is the download link for all the texture files:

https://mega.nz/file/RZ9FhBgQ#qI7mKyP6ezdhAVPXSa84mJYHPx4z3DjJ9ovQa3SIxZI