How hard would it be to recreate these visual effects?

LDKSuperDante

Hello everyone, hopefully I'm asking in the right forum section. This texture here contains a lot of the major visual and lighting effects for a game I'm working on. It's 1024x1024 and I'm looking to recreate it as accurately as possible in 4096x4096. My question is, more specifically than asked in the title, are there any tools for recreating effects like these easily and accurately? I use GIMP and I know it has lots of tools and filters, but I'm not super experienced with them quite yet. I see some things I could recreate using tools but I don't know about most of them. I wanted to see if there was anyone here that was more experienced with GIMP or other programs/tools that knew if I could achieve my goal with tools. One of the reasons I'm emphasizing using tools, is that besides the fact I'm pretty adamant that I want my project to remain faithful to the game's original design anyway, these visual effects are really prominent, so I need them to turn out especially well.

If anyone wants to take a closer look or wants to help, I can share the .dds file. For whatever reason, GIMP blacks out the alpha channel when exporting as a PNG.

lukors

I would recreate them from scratch in Substance Designer. I think it’s a really good tool to create these types of images.

The procedural workflow in Designer also allows you to easily tweak things after creation, including resolution, without loss of quality.

I would make each effect in its own graph and then have one graph that brings all individual graphs together into one image.

LDKSuperDante

Thanks for the info! I may need to find someone to help me then. For whatever reason, Substance seems to have some trouble working properly on my PC.

dgruwier

If you're already unable to recreate these effects in Gimp, then switching to Substance Designer won't help you, even if it's cleaner. 
Since you're concerned about matching the originals well, I'd start by simply AI upscaling your map to 4k. Most of the effects would scale just fine. Some, like gradients and normal maps, will get artifacts, but then you only have to worry about fixing those (with blurs and smudging) or recreating those specific ones. 
There are lots of free AI upscaling tools and models, with even more youtube tutorials on how to use them.

LDKSuperDante

Thanks for the info, I wouldn't say I'm unable to create them in GIMP, I was just asking for some advice to see if I could save myself some time or even find someone to help me make it. I'm very experienced with AI upscaling and I personally think it isn't very good, even nowadays, so I moved away from it a long time ago.

Eric Chadwick

How do the FX look currently with the 1024? Any screenshots to share that show aliasing or jaggies?

The smallest textures look to be 128x128 which should be plenty of resolution. Unless they're being scaled super gigantic.

Also, 4k is super wasteful of texture memory, even compressed. Curious if you could get away with a 2k instead. Really depends on how bad the screenshots look currently.

Eric Chadwick

Hmm I think it's this game? A lot of the jaggies seem to be from low-rez geometry for the spell FX. Though the textures do get blown up pretty large too. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY206fXsa8o?t=252

I'd suggest trying a test of just Bilinear upscaling the texture to 2k, and adding some noise. See how big the pixels of noise get in-game. That should give you an indication if you really need to go to 4k or not.

LDKSuperDante

You guessed correctly haha. I'm working on Dragon's Dogma. Been working on it since Christmas of 2018. My Goal is to make every texture in 4k, I'm not worried about textures being "too big". I'm making each thing in 4k because I figure that's more than enough for most things, and I can scale down if need be, and offer 4k and 2k options of things for those with lower end PCs and/or those who want to pick and choose.

Some things look fine, others look bad because they're pretty blown up. The game also uses BC1/DXT1 and BC3/DXT5 type compression, BC3/DXT5 in the case of this texture. I'm just a bit of a resolution junkie haha, I really like things to be super sharp and detailed, and I like taking very zoomed in shots of those things.

Low res things not only catch my eye a lot because I like to play in 3840x2160 on a 50 inch monitor, but because the game has a lot of instances where you get close up shots of things, and I can't help but focus on the game's low quality assets at times.

Eric Chadwick

Have you tested whether the game will actually run with 4k textures? 

Before you go through all the work of re-making all those assets you should run a simple test… scale all the existing textures up to 4k, add 2% noise, compress and compile. Then run it on current high hardware. Can vmem even handle it without paging the disk constantly?

Also, in a game usually the resolution of each texture is carefully balanced against how it appears in game, not just blanket rezzed up.

LDKSuperDante

Yes, the game runs fine with 4k textures. Not only did I test by putting in hundreds of 4k AI upscales back when I first started my project 5 years ago, but it also has a few natively 4k textures, though they aren't a full 4k, they're 4096x2048, but still.

I've been working on it long enough that I'm fully aware of what the game can do and what it can't, at this point I'm in the process of remaking all my crappy AI upscales by hand so they're actually good.