​CG Texture Upscaler and Utility
With billions of dollars poured into 3D texture creation over the decades of hisotry of computer graphics, AI presents a great opportunity to restore valuable assets. Animation studios which generate collectively close to $400 billion worldwide can leverage advances in AI to modernize their 2D assets leading to large cost savings and efficiency.
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The CG Texture Upscaler takes texture assets and upscales them to modernize productions while producing higher quality base color maps and improving and preserving other material maps. It also provides a convenient utility to batch-process textures with the ability to read and write from and to most CG texture formats.
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Download it here
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Read more about its features and see the results
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Watch the tutorial on how it's used
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Read more on how it was made
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See upcoming developments that give you greater control
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Developers and employers can access the official code repo here
Download
*Please have ImageMagick installed for handling DDS images
Features
Upscale base color maps
Base color maps are the basic texture maps applied to 3D surfaces that define the "base" color of the surface pixel by pixel.
The gallery below presents images before and after a 4x upscale of a base color map using the CG Texture Upscaler.
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The smoothening effect is the current prominent feature of the CG Texture Upscaler since it was adapted from the basic RealESRGAN model and trained on thousands of 3d textures resulting in the smoothing of textures as result of the existing pretrained RealESRGAN. This effect on upscaling works with a lot of CG textures but may not work on others.
![Temple Ground Pattern [base_color] (Original scale)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/230b63_bea2da1656f04113b73e8588e956cd05~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_980,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/230b63_bea2da1656f04113b73e8588e956cd05~mv2.jpg)
![Temple Ground Pattern [base_color] (2x upscale)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/230b63_11305dda0b824ee38e9f7c2ac08c650d~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_980,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/230b63_11305dda0b824ee38e9f7c2ac08c650d~mv2.jpg)
![Cracked Marble [base_color] (4x upscale)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/230b63_841e6daacfac4942bab4a70193368540~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_980,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/230b63_841e6daacfac4942bab4a70193368540~mv2.jpg)
Upscale other material maps
Other material maps include:
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normal and height maps that direct light or occlude geometry surfaces from light completely
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specular/metallic maps that determine light intensity and glossiness/roughness maps that determine the sharpness or diffusion of light
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less relevant material maps include ambient occlusion maps that determine the hardness or softness of shadows and are less impacted by texture resolution, but could still benefit from higher texture resolutions
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The CG Texture Upscaler handles these maps better than conventional upscaler like Topaz's Gigapixel AI or Hitpaw's Photo Enhancer since the RGB channels of the material maps are separated from the alpha where each of the former and latter are upscaled separately.
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The gallery below demonstrtaes a 4x upscale of such texture maps before and after the upscale, as well as a comparison to other upscalers to demonstrate how such texture maps are preserved with the CG Texture Upscaler.
![Snow Terrain [color + AO] (original scale)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/230b63_d09ee31c67d94b4da21784fe573f6d2b~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_256,h_256,al_c,q_80,enc_avif,quality_auto/230b63_d09ee31c67d94b4da21784fe573f6d2b~mv2.jpg)
Another color texture with color information on the RGB channels and ambient occlusion information on the alpha channel (omitted here in order to draw focus to the effect on the RGB channels when comparing the CG texture upscaler and other upscaling tools like TOPAZ Gigapixel).
![CG Texture Upscaler-upscaled Snow Terrain [color + AO] (4x upscale)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/230b63_5d7cf21375eb4a4185c9e6a66263e3e9~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_980,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/230b63_5d7cf21375eb4a4185c9e6a66263e3e9~mv2.jpg)
We notice more defined edges albiet while color information was not smoothed too much. Moreover, the RGB channels are in tact despite the overlapping alpha channel representing occlusion (omitted in the picture above on purpose).
Like before, Topaz interpreted the alpha channel as transparency and erased some important RGB information which is important for the rendering engine. The CG texture upscaler did not damage the RGB channels in such a manner due it's separation handling of RGB and alpha channels.
Another color texture with color information on the RGB channels and ambient occlusion information on the alpha channel (omitted here in order to draw focus to the effect on the RGB channels when comparing the CG texture upscaler and other upscaling tools like TOPAZ Gigapixel).
Batch processing and quality of life features
The CG Texture Upscaler can walk through directories and process images including upscaling, format conversion and edit naming in batches. Standard upscalers will normally batch process a single directory requiring custom scripting to relocate texture files giving rise to potential errors.
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The CG Texture Upscaler allows for conversion to and from various CG texture formats including PNG, TGA, DDS, BMP, EXR and JPG and supports a number of compression algorithms and extra texture processing features such as drawing mip levels for DDS textures through the use of the versatile Image Magick tool.
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The CG Texture Upscaler also allows you to represent your in Linear or sRGB color representations or manually override the gamma level of the image to achieve the intended upscaling result. It further allows you to read and export various color modes including RGB, RGBA, and Greyscale, as well as indexed color for the image formats that support it.
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Finally, quality of life features include a minimalist UI design with accessibility options, the ability to filter and find image files by name or dimensions to process them, preview them on the spot, open their locations and open them for editing using their default program, keyboard shortcuts, as well as logging to know exactly where processing has gone wrong.
Automation
Command line functionality is available for upscaling pipeline automation. The CG Texture Upscaler command line interface allows you to process single directories or recursively process multiple directories, include only files with specific strings (characters/words), as well as define export device, image scale factor, format, compression, noise, export color mode and depth, and color representation of the images to be upscaled, export location and image naming. Download the CLI guide here.
The CG Texture Utility CLI Tool features roughly the same set of options as the GUI and is easy to use.
The CG Texture Utility CLI Tool features roughly the same set of options as the GUI and is easy to use.
Tutorial
Demo
Upcoming Developments
Greater control over your upscaling
Besides improved QoL features coming up in the official release versions (1.x.x), an important upcoming development for the CG Texture Upscaler is the separate handling of texture channels for more tailored results.
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While the CG Texture Upscaler is already smart enough to handle your texture maps so as to not distort the color and alpha information, version 2.0 will allow you to scale RGBA channels separately providing the choice of AI as well as other traditional upscaling algorithms. The diagram below demonstrate how this is implemented.
