Persona 3 Portable HD Texture Pack Community Expansion (WIP) [Updated 12/16/2021]

[BanhCanh]

Just a small update on what I've been trying with AI upscaling, what I did :

- upscaling x2 then downscaling back to 1.0 with waifu2xcaffe
It somehow fixes the transparency of the edge of a upscaled textures (the border between transparent and opaque of a texture).
In P3P, you otherwise notice a black border around the blinking textures during the animation.

- Upscaling with ESRGAN
ARG: --skip_existing --alpha_mode 1 (don't need to split channels with this)
MODEL: 4x_NMKD-Yandere2_255000_G_4x_NMKD-UltraYandere_300k_interp_08.pth

I used 4x_NMKD-UltraYandere_300k because it doesn't mess up the transparent/not transparent border as much as other models.
I interpolated it with 4x_NMKD-Yandere2_255000 because it helps reducing some artifacts introduced by using UltraYandere. Yandere2 also doesn't mess up too much the border mentionned earlier but it doesn't look as good as UltraYandere to be used alone (imo).

- transparency fix with imagemagick, I replaced colors with the following values "rgba(255,255,0,0) and rgba(0,0,0,0)" with a fuzz distance of 5% to rgba (0, 0, 0, 0).
Some ESRGAN models slightly change colors and opacity so it's kind of a workaround to counter that (might break very transparent part of some textures). The rgba values replaced are based on the model I used and the color and opacity change it introduced.

I did my tests mostly in the early games of Growlanser and P3P. Growlanser has some very very noticeable seams so I believe fixing it in Growlanser also helped fixing P3P further.

Results: https://imgsli.com/MzA3MTY/2/3
The blinking seam looks more or less the same as in my previous post (don't have screenshot but I actually tested in game too and it looks just the same!).
The quality might not be phenomenal or anything but at least it doesn't break transparency! (or at least not as much as it used to with the other methods I tried)

I believe that if you only care about portrait in P3P and blinking animation it should be ok but what do you think ?
I'm personally using this method on my personal packs, my first objective is just to get rid of the pixelation that hurts my eyes and I don't want to be bothered with ordering textures etc... so I just upscale the whole thing and hope for the best

It takes ~7hours to upscale ~12K psp-sized textures with a gtx1070.

[hououin_kyouma]

(11-25-2020 03:53 PM)BanhCanh Wrote:  Just a small update on what I've been trying with AI upscaling, what I did :

- upscaling x2 then downscaling back to 1.0 with waifu2xcaffe
It somehow fixes the transparency of the edge of a upscaled textures (the border between transparent and opaque of a texture).
In P3P, you otherwise notice a black border around the blinking textures during the animation.

- Upscaling with ESRGAN
ARG: --skip_existing --alpha_mode 1 (don't need to split channels with this)
MODEL: 4x_NMKD-Yandere2_255000_G_4x_NMKD-UltraYandere_300k_interp_08.pth

I used 4x_NMKD-UltraYandere_300k because it doesn't mess up the transparent/not transparent border as much as other models.
I interpolated it with 4x_NMKD-Yandere2_255000 because it helps reducing some artifacts introduced by using UltraYandere. Yandere2 also doesn't mess up too much the border mentionned earlier but it doesn't look as good as UltraYandere to be used alone (imo).

- transparency fix with imagemagick, I replaced colors with the following values "rgba(255,255,0,0) and rgba(0,0,0,0)" with a fuzz distance of 5% to rgba (0, 0, 0, 0).
Some ESRGAN models slightly change colors and opacity so it's kind of a workaround to counter that (might break very transparent part of some textures). The rgba values replaced are based on the model I used and the color and opacity change it introduced.

I did my tests mostly in the early games of Growlanser and P3P. Growlanser has some very very noticeable seams so I believe fixing it in Growlanser also helped fixing P3P further.

Results: https://imgsli.com/MzA3MTY/2/3
The blinking seam looks more or less the same as in my previous post (don't have screenshot but I actually tested in game too and it looks just the same!).
The quality might not be phenomenal or anything but at least it doesn't break transparency! (or at least not as much as it used to with the other methods I tried)

I believe that if you only care about portrait in P3P and blinking animation it should be ok but what do you think ?
I'm personally using this method on my personal packs, my first objective is just to get rid of the pixelation that hurts my eyes and I don't want to be bothered with ordering textures etc... so I just upscale the whole thing and hope for the best

It takes ~7hours to upscale ~12K psp-sized textures with a gtx1070.

YES! I'm glad someone is working on this. Looks great as far as I can see. I started redrawing them from scratch when I was working on this pack, but there are SO many portraits, that it proved too much work for me alone.

---

(10-29-2020 11:16 AM)ArcEnCiel Wrote:  Hello, sometime ago I was working on extracting PS2 textures for Shadows, Personas and Tartarus and working on implementing them to prior 3x texture pack. I am not particularly interested in maintaining my own separate branch, but I am willing to post the work I have done so far and will be OK with it added to this project.

Example Screenshots:
Sarasvati: https://imgur.com/7DnMvzS , https://imgur.com/XtHE6AO
Nebiros: https://imgur.com/mQgHgUH , https://i.imgur.com/gqobz04.png
Norn: https://imgur.com/cA3v3zC , https://imgur.com/xzdz2DG

Looks great I did the same for just a few enemies (some beetles and shadows if I remember correctly), and they looked much better

[ArcEnCiel]

(11-28-2020 10:55 PM)hououin_kyouma Wrote:  Looks great I did the same for just a few enemies (some beetles and shadows if I remember correctly), and they looked much better

I do have couple other ideas on what I could update with PS2 textures. I will post results when I have something substantial to show.

[TridentOfTheAbyss]

(12-03-2020 04:55 PM)ArcEnCiel Wrote:  

(11-28-2020 10:55 PM)hououin_kyouma Wrote:  Looks great I did the same for just a few enemies (some beetles and shadows if I remember correctly), and they looked much better

I do have couple other ideas on what I could update with PS2 textures. I will post results when I have something substantial to show.

I'm wondering if maybe the Persona 4 Golden PC persona model textures work too. If they did, I'd imagine they'd be 4x the resolution instead of just 2x.

(11-25-2020 03:53 PM)BanhCanh Wrote:  ...

Sounds neat. BTW, in regards to the model being used for upscaling, I've been working on something. My friend has been training a model on the Persona 4 Golden PC and Persona 4 Arena Ultimax portraits which are 1024x1024 (4x the size of P3P's portraits), using Fatality MKII as a pretrained model. He's not done, but it's gone through 125,000 iterations and the result so far was pretty good. Here's a link to the model, but I recommend interpolating it with FatalPixels at .5 to produce 4x_FatalPixels_340000_G_4x_persona_mk3_125000_G_interp_0.5.pth: https://www59.zippyshare.com/v/5sBKnCAp/file.html
It struggles with transparency so I upscale the alpha channels separately with 4x_FatalPixels_340000_G_4x_Fatality_MKII_90000_G_interp_05.pth, though pretty much anything that nails the alpha channels would work. Although this model is very close to the shape of the images that our model produces due to the similarities.
These are images produced by our model: https://imgsli.com/MzE4NzI/0/1

In regards to the blinking animations, I have found something very close to a solution. It stems from the fact that the bottom of the blinking animation is either 124 or 156 pixels from the bottom of the portrait. Therefore, the process of overlaying the blinking animation onto the portrait and cutting it out again can be almost automated. I've sorted and paired every portrait with their blinking animation and roughly grouped the portraits by blinking animation height for now (this is the sorted folder if anyone wants it: https://www16.zippyshare.com/v/mS0fD0Uf/file.html), but if the process of upscaling the portraits and blinking animations were to automated, here's what would need to happen:
1) Every portrait strangely has the transparent areas colored white (though you can't see it unless you remove the transparency). This negatively affects the upscaling and would need to be turned to black. This doesn't seem to be an issue with the blinking animations though.
2) The blinking animations would need to be pasted onto a copy of each portrait before upscaling, using the known heights. This means that this process would need to be performed twice for the two different heights.
3) The interpolated model I mentioned above would be used to upscale both versions of each portrait, with the other model used for alpha channels.
4) The blinking animations would be cut out of the portrait, based on the known height. To be more specific, since the blinking animations normally have transparency at the top and bottom, the blinking animation would actually be cut out to a size of 1024x232. After that, the canvas size of the image would be increased to 1024x256 so that there is transparency at the top and bottom of the blinking animation (see this for an example: https://slow.pics/c/wWhgnYXX).
5) I did one manually and the resulting blinking animation looks something like this if it were in-game: https://slow.pics/c/SLSyJmEd

For the 6x texture pack, I would probably upscale both portrait versions by 1.5x at level 1 denoise using waifu2x after step 3 (which would obviously change the sizes in step 4), though I'm considering changing the 6x pack to a 4x pack.
Regardless, as it stands, I haven't been able to automate it and it takes too long for me to do manually.
Sorry for the long comment, but the results were so good, I felt like I had to explain this. Update on the pack hopefully coming soon.

(11-28-2020 10:55 PM)hououin_kyouma Wrote:  ...

Hey, since your pack is getting quite a lot more views than this one, I wanted to let you know that some of your persona status images in your pack aren't being used since they are misspelled in your textures.ini file. One example is abaddon.png, which is misspelled abbadon.png in the texture pack, but there are about a dozen more. Love your work and hope you can fix that real quick.

[BanhCanh]

I was just about to share about a little thing I found which basically eliminate any blinking issue with the model i'm using. I think it might help.
https://github.com/DinJerr/spritefix

I believe it's made by the author of the very first P3P texture pack, Dinjerr!
Using it before ESRGAN (alpha mode 2, or with IEU) with "4x_NMKD-Yandere2_255000_G_4x_NMKD-UltraYandere_300k_interp_08.pth", I get very close to no issues with blinking animation (very much less than my previous method with waifu2xcaffe).

The spritefix should work with other models though, I tried with 4x_FatalPixels_340000_G_4x_persona_mk3_125000_G_interp_05.pth
And it does work. Had some issues with mitsuru blinking eyes though I don't know why (I get a 0octets png with this model, must be an issue with my script idk). Other than that it is looking great, we don't see any seam on the Yukari's portrait.

Result (left is with spritefix, right without): https://imgsli.com/MzE4ODc

and here is the comparison with the models I'm using (both sides are with spritefix): https://imgsli.com/MzE4ODg
On the right is what I'm actually using so everything is upscaled, but in both yukari, mitsuru and minako (and her pink shadow) and their blinking are upscaled.

I noticed mine has much less details (very noticeable on minako's hair for example) but it works better with alpha.. Not noticeable in P3P though so I guess yours is the way to go for it! Thanks for sharing
Anyway if you want to do your own comparisons, my dump upscaled not sorted: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18dEsl0f...sp=sharing

If you can upscale both blinking and portraits together it is indeed the best for P3P portraits though and you already paired every portraits, very nice. Hope it turns out well!

[TridentOfTheAbyss]

(12-04-2020 09:25 AM)BanhCanh Wrote:  I was just about to share about a little thing I found which basically eliminate any blinking issue with the model i'm using. I think it might help.
https://github.com/DinJerr/spritefix

Yo, that's sick! Let's go! Thanks for the help, looks good in your example. I'll get testing soon, but I'm pretty busy right now.

[ArcEnCiel]

There is one idea I had about Character sprites on overworld that i've been wondering, but I'm not quite sure how feasible it would be. So for PS2 texture extraction I've been using Amicitia tool. And in some screenshot for the tool I saw 3d Models being shown in a corner (https://i.imgur.com/drz5nPr.png)

I was wondering how possible it would be what Atlus probably did and "photograph" the model in the same pose but with better resolution.

Problem is I myself never was able to make 3D model appear in the corner. If anyone happens to know more about that tool I'd be interested in hearing.

[ArcEnCiel]

Few more PS2 texture additions:
I did 77 Persona cards for Shuffle Time which while not all of them should be a fair chunk of them(https://imgsli.com/MzIxNzc/6/7)
Additional Monster textures.
And couple Weapon Textures.

Download Link. https://mega.nz/file/g09HRKTQ#fHpeK0ShvK...My2vud-wFQ

[TridentOfTheAbyss]

Update 2.1 is finally out! Probably should've updated the pack much earlier because this feels more like a version 3.0 than a version 2.1. As for what I'm working on next:
- Pupils for certain portraits of characters like Akihiko, Aigis, Fuuka, and Yukari need to be manually redrawn unless an alternative is found. This ranges from super easy to beyond my skill level.
- I need to reupscale the dynamic backdrops. In order to release the update, I had to put this off since it would take quite a while due to the stitching and cutting involved. I only did one or two for v2.1.
- There are a few stray textures that need upscaling still, like the font texture 000000007a2e8be69715930a.
- The alpha channels need to be fixed for the social link portraits.

Also, I finally compressed the textures. I used pngcrush to do it and the compression was lossless. So much of the file size was shaved off and (to my knowledge) nothing was ruined.

(12-06-2020 04:12 PM)ArcEnCiel Wrote:  Few more PS2 texture additions:
I did 77 Persona cards for Shuffle Time which while not all of them should be a fair chunk of them(https://imgsli.com/MzIxNzc/6/7)
Additional Monster textures.
And couple Weapon Textures.

Download Link. https://mega.nz/file/g09HRKTQ#fHpeK0ShvK...My2vud-wFQ

Thanks for all the textures. In regards to the Persona cards, I had already upscaled all the persona cards using ESRGAN since the ones from the PS2 are stylistically different than the ones from P3P and (more importantly) do not include all the possible card textures. I plan to create some patches for the pack down the line that lets people choose a more faithful or less faithful version of the textures, so these would definitely be useful then.

[flamecrest920]

(12-15-2020 07:01 AM)TridentOfTheAbyss Wrote:  ..

Your work is amazing! I'm still working away at applying PS2 textures to the Personas, but this pack looks better and better with each release.

[ArcEnCiel]

(12-15-2020 08:16 AM)flamecrest920 Wrote:  Your work is amazing! I'm still working away at applying PS2 textures to the Personas, but this pack looks better and better with each release.

I have done similar thing previously and posted it in this thread. You might wanna check that work to see if you're not repeating what was done already, or if there's anything you think you could improve on compared to mine attempts.

Edit: Only noticed 2.1 update after posting this. Good job Trident.

Edit 2: One thing I noticed while looking at blinking animation was that sometimes the contours of face (Or Koromaru's wing) would slightly distort if it didn't match the underlying texture completely. So as a quick test on Koromaru and Ken I decided to delete most of the face part and only leave eyes, and to me the result looked better. Here are the 3 sample textures. https://mega.nz/file/dg8gWRqT#iVs4zXNCJy...D5dy1xsgtk

[TridentOfTheAbyss]

(12-15-2020 12:58 PM)ArcEnCiel Wrote:  ...

Edit 2: One thing I noticed while looking at blinking animation was that sometimes the contours of face (Or Koromaru's wing) would slightly distort if it didn't match the underlying texture completely. So as a quick test on Koromaru and Ken I decided to delete most of the face part and only leave eyes, and to me the result looked better. Here are the 3 sample textures. https://mega.nz/file/dg8gWRqT#iVs4zXNCJy...D5dy1xsgtk

That's another thing I'm starting to do with version 2.2 since I noticed that it works better. I'm also replacing the blinking animations that aren't actually blinking with just transparency. Thanks for the head start! Also, what program did you use to do that since it looks very clean cut?

[ArcEnCiel]

I just used Gimp and just dragged a selection and deleted it. BTW would you be interested in Persona 4 Golden PC Shuffle time card dump? It has issue of yellow outlines but if that can be adjusted I think it will be way better than the upscale.

I could probably do some of that blinking editing, just tell me from which letter to start.

[TridentOfTheAbyss]

(12-15-2020 06:04 PM)ArcEnCiel Wrote:  I just used Gimp and just dragged a selection and deleted it. BTW would you be interested in Persona 4 Golden PC Shuffle time card dump? It has issue of yellow outlines but if that can be adjusted I think it will be way better than the upscale.

I could probably do some of that blinking editing, just tell me from which letter to start.

The Persona 4 Golden PC Shuffle time cards were too difficult for me to edit (maybe because I suck), but I'm still trying to get my hands on the persona model sheets since those might be higher quality versions of the Persona 3 PS2 textures. As for where to start, just start from the bottom up. I probably won't be able to start editing for a week though. I'm pretty busy.

[ArcEnCiel]

OK from bottom up 3x version it is.