[SOLVED] Upscaling lightmaps and bumpmaps

[Peterburg22 0]

Hai hai.

I've been playing KOTOR 1 and noticed that the textures are old and ugly, so I'm making my own upscaling mod using Gigapixel AI (not sure whether I should release it to the public if I finish it, there are already 10 million upscale mods for the game).

While I'm at it, I've also noticed that the lightmaps in the game are very blurry and low-res, and I haven't seen any mods that tackle this (I can barely even find any documentation on modding lightmaps).

What I was wondering, is if the lightmaps can be put out into a .TIF file or the like, and then upscaled. I've found a bunch of lightmaps.bif files in Kotor Tool, and under them there are TGA images, so it looks like a pretty simple process in terms of just outputting them and upscaling them.

But I'm very inexperienced, and I just wanted to know:

1. Are the TGA images the actual textures that I'll need to upscale?

2. Will I have to rebake the lightmaps into the map (or do something such), or just plop those textures into Override and it'll work?

I'm not sure if I worded all of this proper-like; this is my first time getting in the game's guts so I barely understand what I'm doing with the normal textures I'm upscaling, let alone the lightmaps that I've never touched. Help is appreciated.

EDIT: Another thing - upscaling bumpmaps pretty much makes the game throw them out with errors when I boot it up, and things like Selkath and water just have no bumpmaps when loaded up that way. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but any help getting to the bottom of that would be very appreciated as well. I've attached the upscaled Selkath texture and bumpmap if that helps.

n_selkath01b.tga n_selkath01.tga

Edited January 10, 2020 by Peterburg22

[DarthParametric 3,782]

Due to the way lightmaps are baked, upscaling is unlikely to produce desirable results. You'll almost certainly end up with a lot of nasty artefacts. But yes, for K1 all you need to do is put TGAs in the Override. TSL uses TPC lightmaps, so if you are using TGAs you'll need to create matching TXIs.

The engine only supports normal maps in TPC format, specifically RGBA DXT5. Given the fairly poor implementation, there's probably little to be gained trying to upscale them.

[Peterburg22 0]

25 minutes ago, DarthParametric said:

Due to the way lightmaps are baked, upscaling is unlikely to produce desirable results. You'll almost certainly end up with a lot of nasty artefacts. But yes, for K1 all you need to do is put TGAs in the Override. TSL uses TPC lightmaps, so if you are using TGAs you'll need to create matching TXIs.

The engine only supports normal maps in TPC format, specifically RGBA DXT5. Given the fairly poor implementation, there's probably little to be gained trying to upscale them.

You're a hero man, thanks for the response.

It's a shame I can't upscale the bumpmaps (at least not without going through a serious pain in the butt), because I've seen that work pretty well in other upscale mods, like for Oblivion and Fallout 3. Oh well. Deleting the upscaled ones I made resolved all the issues with them loading wrong.

Again, thanks for helping solve the issue.

[DarthParametric 3,782]

30 minutes ago, Peterburg22 said:

It's a shame I can't upscale the bumpmaps (at least not without going through a serious pain in the butt)

It's not particularly painful. Grab TGA2TPC, load your TGA, set the export directory, set the compression to DXT5 (make sure your normal map has a solid white alpha),  create an appropriate TXI or change the setting to text and paste it in the box. At a minimum you will need

isbumpmap 1

If you have modified the diffuse, then it will also need a TXI that includes

bumpmaptexture filenamehere

that points to the filename of the normal map.

[Peterburg22 0]

15 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

It's not particularly painful. Grab TGA2TPC, load your TGA, set the export directory, set the compression to DXT5 (make sure your normal map has a solid white alpha),  create an appropriate TXI or change the setting to text and paste it in the box. At a minimum you will need

isbumpmap 1

If you have modified the diffuse, then it will also need a TXI that includes

bumpmaptexture filenamehere

that points to the filename of the normal map.

Thanks for the tip. I'm afraid that's still a bit out of my league though. I don't know how to go about giving the normal map a "solid white alpha". Would I be able to do that in Photoshop CS2 or what?

EDIT: Alright, I managed to figure out everything on my own with the instructions from this post:

The end result looks quite nice, and works well with the upscaled textures. Pretty glad with how it turned out.

@DarthParametricHuge props for helping me figure this out.

Edited January 11, 2020 by Peterburg22