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.