Ignoring how blurry it will be, is there anything I have to do to get an upscaled texture to display correctly? E.g. if I take a 64x64 texture and increase the image size to 256x256, will it still stretch over the mesh properly and get rid of the jagged pixels? I have no experience whatsoever with texture modding apart from downloading what other people have made, and all the guides and explanations I'm finding are about making textures from scratch and I have no patience for dealing with any 3d programs.
Backstory:
I love and adore lysol's textures, but I loathe having mismatched textures, so until he has a whole set, I'm up a creek in terms of what I use. Pure vanilla is not an option, but I do insist the textures be vanilla friendly. All these feelings eventually led me to use the watercolored texture mod. In general, I really like the aesthetic since it is literally vanilla filtered to get rid of the obvious pixelation and blurring from upscaling. One very large drawback though, is that many of the textures still show zigzags along where single pixels used to be. This gave me a new idea, that I think I will be able to pull off so let me know what you all think and any advice for different steps.
Objective:
Create a series of batch processes that will convert vanilla textures into larger textures that don't necessarily have to keep all the details, but should be "artistically" close.
Process:
First a simple batch upscale of all textures by 2 or 4 times depending on what works better in game. The problem is this often leaves things blurry and there will be weird areas where it's obvious where the pixels were. My idea is to transfer this into Illustrator and use it's vector trace to make all edges super clear and smooths everything out while still maintaining the essence of the image. From my preliminary tests, it seems like this actually would be an ok place to stop and convert back as it already somewhat resembles the watercolored mod. However, I really like the hand drawn aesthetic, so I would transfer this back to Photoshop and apply one of their stylistic filters. I might try to mimic the watercolor look, but there's an oil painting filter that has these really cool brush strokes so I'll probably see how that looks as well. Since this whole thing will be batch processed it will be easy to try a few different things like that. Then take that and resave into a DDS.
I think the most difficult part will be getting the image trace and the filter settings right so that it works on all different image sizes. I don't think I'll have the patience to come up with different settings for each different size. I had thought about upscaling everything to a single size, running all the processing and then rescaling the results down to their appropriate sizes, but I don't think batch processing is that smart. I'm an expert in Photoshop, but I've never used batch processing much, so that will be a bit of a challenge to get just right as well.
In terms of my actual questions:
- Do I need to treat the images in any once I've upscaled them? I don't want weird gaps or overlaps or other artifacts, but based on simply using texture replacers, this doesn't seem to be a problem.
- Many of the textures are mipmapped. I have a vague idea of what it's for, but is this necessary to keep? How does OpenMW utilize it?
- Obviously making the files larger will slow things down, but this is such an old game there should be some wiggle room. Regardless, how big is too big?
- What steps do I need to take to try and optimize things a little? I learned that DDS is just a container format so do any of you know any resources for deciding how to package the final files? Is there anything specific about OpenMW that I should know?
PS, lysol, if you need any help with your stuff I'd be glad to help in any way I can.