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(3 edits)

Hey! I thought all your new weapons were amazing,  the only thing I would recommend is giving them a bit of a visual enhancing,

Here's what I did: I asked ChatGPT to use Real ESRGAN (and there are better options, see below) to upscale one of the new enemy textures of your mod, and the results were outstanding. Check out this comparison of the enhanced texture vs the base one: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nASW3QDngzz2w-KDyQ_6e-4B5-LBdmLK/view?usp=shari...

Looks good, no?

You do have to save the image into PNG or JPG before giving it to Chat GPT.

And ask it to give you the image in 1024 x 1024. You can then scale it down yourself if you wish.


I would recommend applying the process to your new weapons like the Lava Gun or the cool new cannon, or the Minelayer and Plasmalauncher. They look great, but this extra art pass can do wonders for them.

And the same goes for some of the classic enemies (Biomechs, Reptiles) which really need a new coat of paint after many years, 
New enemies (Cyclops, Kamikaze Mk 2) 
And any old or new level textures you would like to give a better look to.


And, Chat GPT actually told me that for games like Serious Sam, Real-ESRGAN is no longer the best option, because while its good as a general purpose upscaler, it says newer models preserve texture detail much better and introduce fewer artifacts.

Its own recommendations were 

1. ESRGAN 4x+ / UltraSharp (Best all-around)

✅ Excellent for diffuse textures

✅ Keeps edges crisp

✅ Less "AI painting" effect than Real-ESRGAN

Good if you're batch processing hundreds of textures.

2. DAT (Detail-Aware Texture Upscaler)

✅ Specifically trained on game textures

✅ Preserves brick, cloth, metal, wood grain

✅ Much less hallucination

3. CCSR (CodeFormer team's restoration model)

Better than Real-ESRGAN for damaged or compressed textures.

Doesn't invent as many fake details.

4. SUPIR (Current state of the art)

Fantastic quality.

Can reconstruct missing detail.

Slow.

Sometimes changes the artwork too much, which isn't ideal for faithful remasters.

5. Flux + ControlNet Tile

If you want a remake rather than an upscale.

Can produce nearly modern AAA-quality textures.

Not suitable if you need the UV layout to remain pixel-perfect.

For old Serious Sam textures


It then gave me a recommended workflow:

Original 256×256

        ↓

DAT or UltraSharp (4×)

        ↓

Optional denoise

        ↓

Sharpen slightly

        ↓

Downscale to 512×512 if desired


As upscaling to 1024 and then downsampling to 512 often produces cleaner results than directly generating a 512×512 version.

People have recommended I do some texture upscaling, but all these models are a lot more complicated than they seem. But wait, ChatGPT can use ESRGAN?

(1 edit)

Yes, you can ask Chat GPT to use ESRGAN and Real ESRGAN. Please see my test results here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nASW3QDngzz2w-KDyQ_6e-4B5-LBdmLK/view?usp=shari...

And it seems it has several more models available, you only need to ask it what it can do and upload the texture or image you want it to work on. Very useful.

Claude might be the same.

ChatGPT even recommended more advanced models ( ESRGAN 4x+ / UltraSharp  and DAT, among others - see my post above for its explanation)