Skins Upscaling liveries (quick and dirty)

[Elmar3rd]

Even with 4k liveries, I'm sometimes bothered by pixaleted textures on the car.
Here is a quick and dirty way to upscale liveries with Real ESRGAN.

Real ESRGAN is an AI image upscaler, distributed under an open source licence.
These upscalers were initially developed for anime drawings, but are mostly trained with photos as well. And they work very well on car surfaces too.

Sofware

a) Real ESRGAN portable Windows / Linux / MacOS executable files for Intel/AMD/Nvidia GPU: https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN
b) ... or a GUI like Real ERSGAN-GUI (Windows): https://github.com/tsukumijima/Real-ESRGAN-GUI/releases
c) A graphics tool that can read and write PNG and DDS, e.g. "XnView MP" (Freeware): https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/

Upscaling

1. MAKE A COPY of the folder with the car-livery you want to upscale.

2. Look for the surface-file (or files) with your graphics tool.

• These files are DDS-files, eg. "Skin_00.dds".
• Sometimes the cars surface is splittet into several files, some others are for helmets or gloves.
• A picture size of 2048x2048px means "2k". 4k is 4096x4096. Don't upscale files that already are 8k.

3. Open the DDS surface-file and save it as PNG with your graphics tool.

4. Upscale the PNG-file with Real-ESRGAN.

Suggested model for car-liveries:
realesr-animevideov3 (default)

Scale factors:
2k -> 4k: 2x
2k -> 8k: 4x
4k -> 8k: 2x

Command line example for 2x upscale:
realesrgan-ncnn-vulkan.exe -i Skin_00.png -o Skin_00_2x.png -n realesr-animevideov3 -s 2

5. Convert the upscaled PNG to DDS and save/overwrite the previous DDS surface file

6. You can delete the temporarily generated PNG-files, as they are quite big.