[BETA] EE AI Denoised Areas

[Andrea C.]

9 hours ago, Leilu said:

It's not really up to me.

Thank you for your reply, and for all the work you're pouring into this.

I will definitely be using this in my next EE playthrough, and indeed being able to upscale other assets would be fantastic (should you ever get to that part, please ping me; I've got mods that restore BG1 paperdolls and sprites and I'd like to give them the upscale treatment too.) What a time to be an IE gamer

Edited May 7, 2022 by Andrea C.

[temnix]

I don't like this. Normal vision is not that sharp. And it's a small thing, but everything has consequences. When they started shooting films in high definition, it wasn't only an unnatural crispness that resulted.

[Zutroy]

{blank space}

Edited October 18, 2023 by Zutroy

[Graion Dilach]

1 hour ago, temnix said:

When they started shooting films in high definition

You mean... I dunno, 1940? The 35mm print due to it's analogue format always had the "HD" image quality and it was always the middlemen from there onwards which lost it (tapes, NTSC, SECAM and PAL television standards, VCD/DVD resolution). A lot of these older movie restorations are actually just rescans of the reel because modern technology offers better scanning possibilities. Star Trek - The Next Generation is even famous in this regard - all the episodes (including the model shots) were filmed using 35mm, but all the visual effects were composited directly to tapes, so the master reels lack all the special effects. When they took the series to remastering they literally just rescanned the reels and rebuilt the special effects. It then turned out that the setpieces always had vibrant colors and the details and they all got lost because of the postprocessing process.

[Quester]

9 hours ago, temnix said:

I don't like this. Normal vision is not that sharp. And it's a small thing, but everything has consequences. When they started shooting films in high definition, it wasn't only an unnatural crispness that resulted.

When I don't like what a mod does to the game, I will usually just...not use it. 

I mean, I could tell everyone that I don't like it, but what would be the point of that?

[temnix]

Call it the ultra HD, then. Yes, I have seen unrestored black-and-white movies, and they are foggy. Some of them, anyway. I don't think much of the documentary footage I've seen has been specially restored, and those scenes from a hundred years back look acceptable, fairly sharp and detailed. Why wouldn't they be? The quality of still photography in 1922 was no worse than in 2022. But for big-screen material the conditions might have been different. Or they were shot differently. Or just kept badly. In any case, nobody back then would say that a foggy picture is like what they eye sees - if indeed the pictures were foggy at the time. But neither is the sort of thing you get in digital porn today natural. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Whether that's a property of the material, the technique or the wandering and dreaming human perception (we see associations and ideas as much as the physical medium), nobody stares hard at surfaces like this, all surfaces and all points at once. Maybe because nothing matters so much that it's worth staring at for so long, and one demands the right to shift one's attention and ignore certain parts at leisure. The natural look, in any case, is comfortably slightly-blurry.

Besides, you don't get any more of real detail by sharpening pictures. The information simply isn't there. Now, if you were to take a stylus and draw a tiny pattern on that rug before the entrance, then you would really be giving players something. As it is, they are being dipped in a pseudo-fresh world where they expect more meaningful details that they could, for instance, zoom in on, which is always very nice, if they can then zoom out to the business level. But the details aren't there. What you are giving them is an empty box of promise, candy wrapper. I don't bash anybody without a reason, but this is yet another type of mod that deludes people into self-contentment. As with tweaks, they think they are getting something, when they are not.

 

 

[Bartimaeus]

In cinema and traditional animation, there are usually two trains of thought - those who prefer the original film grain/noise that is natural to analogue image sources (whether actual film tape or hand-drawn animation cels), and those who think film grain/noise is the devil and wish to denoise everything so that everything looks flat (in terms of color variation) and clean. Those of the "grain is good" school also tend to prefer softer colors and lines, while the latter generally prefer more vivid/saturated colors and extra sharp lines...but this is by no means a rule, and there are people who like one kind of element but not the other - not to mention that there are degrees to which an individual might prefer these things. Personally, I am overwhelmingly in the "grain is good" school of thinking (and thus I have hated and greatly protested the transition from traditional film and animation to digital mediums, while not even factoring in the use of 3D CGI as a totally separate issue), and so I think the result here looks distinctly inferior to the original image (looks very much like some kind of denoising + sharpening filters, perhaps selectively, were used to create these results), but it is certainly a valid preference and it will have its audience...as most of the comments in this thread are proof of. In the original imagery's defense, the sort of people who don't like the result here are probably disinclined to comment in the first place, since it's pretty freaking rude to just take a dump over someone's hard work, which I have hopefully not done here in trying to provide this explanation.

Modern high resolution film scans is also a bit of a different issue altogether, since such high resolutions scans still retain their film grain that is simply inherent to film reels (not to mention the process of digitization!). The vast majority of new high resolution scans of old films or animated works are gorgeous compared to the older ones used for VHS and DVD...but I occasionally run into works that were butchered via post-processing in the form of DNR (dynamic noise reduction) - the latest Terminator 2 4K release is one example that I think looks genuinely terrible compared to earlier blurays. It's not because of the new scan they did, just the misbegotten post-processing techniques used that made everything look plastic and artificial to the point of uncanny valley. If the BG games' original assets were available, I would certainly be very much in favor of a modern scan in order to create high resolution backgrounds - to be honest, I think it's a huge credit to the game and its artists that the backgrounds still look as good as they do given that the original assets were apparently completely lost.

Edited May 8, 2022 by Bartimaeus
disaster of a post, many edits

[Leilu]

2 hours ago, temnix said:

The natural look, in any case, is comfortably slightly-blurry.

I understand your argument, but it is only valid if we were playing at a zoom level of 100% of the area images resolution. But it seems to me that nobody plays with the camera so far from the action. It will inevitably look blurry no matter what in normal gameplay situations.

2 hours ago, temnix said:

Besides, you don't get any more of real detail by sharpening pictures. The information simply isn't there. Now, if you were to take a stylus and draw a tiny pattern on that rug before the entrance, then you would really be giving players something.

I know. I'm the first to hate sharpen filters that add details that don't exist. Here it is simply a little bit of blur removal but mostly the global noise or even noise artifacts (too big and prominent grains) that the image contains which is removed, especially on dark surfaces. I called this mod AI "Denoised" Areas for a reason and I'm aware that there's still some manual work to be done to put some noise back on some surfaces.

2 hours ago, temnix said:

What you are giving them is an empty box of promise, candy wrapper. I don't bash anybody without a reason, but this is yet another type of mod that deludes people into self-contentment.

Are you talking to me? I have known more courteous ways to give an opinion.

If I worked on this mod, it's because I enjoy it. Then I shared what I did and if others like the mod, so much the better.

Anyway, I don't know if you can imagine how demotivating your comments can be, not because you give an opinion that can be heard and discussed but because you do it as if nobody could enjoy playing with any mod you don't like.

For my part, I'm happy to see anyone release any mod even if I don't like it or don't see the point. Modders are progressing, improving and it keeps the game and its community alive.

In any case, this is probably the last time I will answer you if you remain so denigrating, even with "a reason". It is far from pleasant and I am not comfortable enough in English to debate without misunderstandings.

-----

@Bartimaeus

Thank you for this opinion which I understand perfectly.

If we can get the tools to run increased resolution assets one day, I will certainly have a choice to make about the presence of grain.

In fact, when I started experimenting with this mod, I would have liked to be able to keep more grain, but some parts of the image (especially the shadows) have grains that are really too big, pronounced and ugly to be corrected without having to drastically increase the "remove noise" slider of the AI upscale program I use.

Then, as I couldn't take advantage of the increased resolution in game anyway, I thought that at least removing the noise and blur from the image might suit some people including myself in the end.  

Edited May 8, 2022 by Leilu

[Bartimaeus]

@Leilu I rewrote a bit of my post (and added a bit more) in between when you initially looked at/quoted it and when you submitted your post just now, so just noting that quickly here...and also, don't worry too much about what temnix says or how he says it - he is a bit of an abrasive loon, and very unapologetic to boot. Often on to some interesting ideas, but polite dialogue is usually difficult. You and a number of other people clearly like the result, and that's certainly good enough.

Edited May 8, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Acifer]

Thank you so much for this mod - I've been waiting for something like this for years! The denoising emphasizes the painted look of the games in a very pleasant way. 

Can't wait to install the new graphics on my iPad!

[Graion Dilach]

@Bartimaeus Dithering in videogames has nothing to do with other media though, it's just a workaround/benefit of an outdated technical limitation. used for color mixing, because the analogue tech (VGA/CRT) and it's loose subpixel calibration allowed pixels to blend which then allowed developers to use less colors in the palettes without the limitation being visible. With the transition to digital and exact controlling of a monitor subpixel, dithering is simply just no longer viable. The fact that a fair amount of TFT monitors these days cannot pass the checkerboard calibration test just exposes this issue - both my TN and my IPS panel from two different vendors consisting my multimonitor setup seizures on the checkerboard test. Ofcourse overdone contrast is a problem but ultimately, these days noise is noise and not the blending effect it was 20 years ago.

[The_Baffled_King]

The difference is astonishing! I suppose I can't say with 100% certainty that it fits my preference without seeing the in-game result - but I will definitely install it and try it out.

I think it's good for modding in general that there are people out there approaching the game from different angles like this.

[Bartimaeus]

9 hours ago, Graion Dilach said:

@Bartimaeus Dithering in videogames has nothing to do with other media though, it's just a workaround/benefit of an outdated technical limitation. used for color mixing, because the analogue tech (VGA/CRT) and it's loose subpixel calibration allowed pixels to blend which then allowed developers to use less colors in the palettes without the limitation being visible. With the transition to digital and exact controlling of a monitor subpixel, dithering is simply just no longer viable. The fact that a fair amount of TFT monitors these days cannot pass the checkerboard calibration test just exposes this issue - both my TN and my IPS panel from two different vendors consisting my multimonitor setup seizures on the checkerboard test. Ofcourse overdone contrast is a problem but ultimately, these days noise is noise and not the blending effect it was 20 years ago.

If it is indeed actually just because of dithering (though it looks too noisy for it to only be an issue of dithering to me, since from what I can tell there is literally not a single even small area on the original images that looks to have a clean color gradient, which suggests issues beyond simple dithering), then that is also a different matter from the previously discussed issues as well...but the end result is still practically the same: it is not possible to revert the effects of dithering cleanly and without further loss of detail. Even some quick looks at the linked comparison images reveal a number of areas where there is an unfortunate loss of detail - manual restoration of those details is possible, but it is a pretty time-consuming...and I would know, considering I've worked on projects similar to this one before and so I have absolutely zero desire to criticize anyone doing something like this. However, all of that is completely irrelevant if the results are subjectively superior for many users, as subjective quality always trumps everything else. That's absolutely true even for myself as well - it just so happens that I'm on the opposite side of what is subjectively better in this particular case. In other words, carry on, as the results and what the people commenting in here prefer speak for themselves.

Edited May 9, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[temnix]

Sometimes you say something that is perceived as offense, and you feel sorry for it and want to explain, but then you realize the person doesn't understand what you are talking about.

[Quester]

Ah the woes of interpersonal communication. Difficult for all, more so for those on the spectrum. Especially when tone and facial expression are out of the equation.

Life gets easier the more you are able not to take things too personally.