AI Upscaling Textures

[Willuiji 0]

Hello, I have tried to upscale a few mod textures for my game with cupscale but the texture mapping is off. I'm curious if anyone has experience with this process. If its possible to use cupscale? If I should use something else? How get 2048x2048 textures to map correctly. I am very new to this process so apologize if these are kind of newbie-type questions. Thanks!

[LoneWanderer 98]

Is there any benefit in using cupscale specifically? Until the recent AI boom, Replicate.com provided the best upscaling among services based on the Real-ESRGAN model (and it didn't require registration back then). For icon upscaling I used https://www.upscale.media (although sometimes the result is better without "Enhance Quality" option), but any AI-upscaling service should work, because the icons in the game will be small and the difference in quality will be not very noticeable.

Do you remove alpha-channel from the texture before upscaling? AI upscaling tends to mess it up, so it's better to scale it separately: extract the alpha-channel into a new image, use the 'Turn Alpha to Gray' option in an image editor like Gimp or Paint.Net (with plugins), then scale it up and turn back to alpha.

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[Lewok2007 41]

On 9/2/2023 at 5:02 AM, LoneWanderer said:

Do you remove alpha-channel from the texture before upscaling? AI upscaling tends to mess it up, so it's better to scale it separately: extract the alpha-channel into a new image, use the 'Turn Alpha to Gray' option in an image editor like Gimp or Paint.Net (with plugins), then scale it up and turn back to alpha.

Would just like to add in that in GIMP, you can go to layers > transparency > remove alpha channel to remove the alpha layer, and then you can add it back in after by going to layers > transparency > add alpha channel. 

It's a nice feature to use and it works fine.