[MOD] Cockpit 4k rework

[LizLemon]

 

 

Still figuring out how textures are split up, the seat doesnt seem to be part of the big cockpit textures.

 

OLD LINK

4k and the preset on ultra may be required for this to work. Still very WIP


 

 

 

NEW LINK SEPT 3

Here is a yak1s69 cockpit for trying out

https://mega.nz/#!PDRWFSCZ!GSGlaS6kqjKDPwdSfpazpvKZnpUVa3IS1OWRGLpnp2s

Edited September 3, 2018 by LizLemon

[Picchio]

I'd encourage you to try and re-do that weathering from scratch; the way it is (2K or 4K doesn't really matter) it doesn't look good and it doesn't give a good visual feeling of the material. The weathering/deterioration as it is represented looks too imaginative, and often just exaggerated.

 

Another way (which I experimented and I can share the result with you if you wish to see how it's like) would be to resample the whole texture with careful attention to the noise reduction while enlarging it. After that, other filters can be applied in order to obtain a decent result. But still, nothing can compare to making the texture anew, if one is good at it.

Unfortunately I found other obstacles - the major being the discrepancy between 3D geometry dimension/number of pixels available for its texture.

 

To simplify, there are big things in the cockpits that can use just too few pixels to look good: you've got to find how much detail you can put into them without making them look crap. Weathering is one of those details.

 

Good luck, looking forward to see more!

[LizLemon]

I'm not resampling the texture, I'm using a neural net algorithm that has been trained on video game textures to upscale. This does a really good job of getting small details right that other approaches to upscaling just cant do. See the example pic I've attached. I'm trying to come up with an easy workflow that will allow me to redo all the textures with a minimal of human input - it wont be as good as redrawing everything of course.

 

Yes, the color noise in the 109 texture is really bad. Its almost like they used jpegs or something as there is no way DDS textures should look that compressed. The color noise would have to be removed before running the texture through upscaling, but as denoising in PS screws up details the only way to do it would be through using layer masks. Kind of a pain.

 

And I have also noticed the texel density problem with the 109. Stuff like the seat and the area behind it is really bad while barely visible areas could have been much less detailed without being noticeable. The newer cockpits are much better and tend to have several textures for the cockpit rather than the Fs one large texture and a couple smaller ones.

 

The F4 was probably one of the worst places to start with this due to the problems its cockpit has.

 

[HardymachtParty]

So excited to see the the outcome !

Would be a great graphically improvement to the (ugly) F-Cockpit

[Picchio]

17 hours ago, LizLemon said:

a neural net algorithm that has been trained on video game textures to upscale

 

That sounds so exciting! I hope it is just as effective. I'm going to investigate.

So far, would you say that it can produce better results than, say, the best resampling method you could work out in PS?

Edited July 22, 2018 by Picchio

[Jade_Monkey]

Just curious, what NN are you using exactly?

[LizLemon]

One that requires way to many dependencies and doesnt have a public data set. Unfortunately it doesnt do a good job of getting rid of color noise in the textures and it might be worth training a set just for this game.

 

Another discovery is that its possible to run the ground textures at double resoultion, ie 1024 instead of 512. I havent tried 2048 or higher yet but they may work. Its nice that this game just accepts higher resolution textures without throwing a fit.

 

However I am having issues exporting the alpha channel as you can see in this comparison. I really hope this is just an issue with the DDS export plugin in my version of photoshop.

[FTC_Riksen]

[SCG_Tzigy]

does your wife know riks?  

[SCG_OpticFlow]

On 7/19/2018 at 2:39 AM, LizLemon said:

Still figuring out how textures are split up, the seat doesnt seem to be part of the big cockpit textures.

 

4k and the preset on ultra may be required for this to work. Still very WIP

https://mega.nz/#!7KZnTCYC!iLPia8zcO_AcESY-CuDOHKGja_Knv_Mkf_YsTzt4TCY

 

 

Would be nice to have an option for a newly-looking cockpit without chipped paint and worn surfaces.

 

I really hate the weathering "effects", especially on surfaces that are not easy to reach and touch. Here 50 years old, unrestored airplanes in the museum look much cleaner and newer than the supposedly no older than a year or two planes we have in the game.

[Thad]

Yea, but I guarantee that those 50 year old craft do not have that new plane smell. ?

[SCG_OpticFlow]

11 minutes ago, Thad said:

Yea, but I guarantee that those 50 year old craft do not have that new plane smell. ?

 

New plane smell mod: apply machine oil on controller surfaces and face.

[LizLemon]

Still messing around with this. I've found that using noise reduction gets rid of the color noise almost entirely.

 

However, it decimates some of the details. But this doesnt happen when noise reduction is off. So what I can do is 2 scalings of the image, one with noise reduction and one without. I then blend the two together in photoshop, selecting areas that need detail preservation. This works well but is time consuming.

 

Ignore the difference in lighting... I think the results are worth it.

 

Edited September 3, 2018 by LizLemon

[KpgQuop]

You bet they're worth it! Well Done.

[DD_Arthur]

This is really excellent.  Yak cockpit seems more......I dunno, vibrant?   Whatever it is, it works for me.

 

 

[Thad]

Wow... simply WOW. I just took a Yak1 s 69 for a spin. Your 4K cockpit looks fantastic! 

 

I can only hope you develop such cockpits for many of the other IL2 aircraft. Very well done. 

[LizLemon]

Il2m42, Fw-190a3, Pe-2s87

https://mega.nz/#!7CBiXAIS!AGpAi9CCgQtnYoRxNx_lY0a0TAOIUXLGwu2a0OKDjdE

[6./ZG26_5tuka]

Nice work there. Saves a lot of time compared to recreating all details entirely and still preserves suprisingly lots of the original.

 

Just to be sure, this is a Photoshop plugin or seperate tool you're working with?

Edited September 5, 2018 by 6./ZG26_5tuka

[SCG_motoadve]

How do you install it?

I cannot see a difference, mods ON, and I copied the files to the specific folders.

Does anyone see a difference in VR?

[LizLemon]

3 hours ago, 6./ZG26_5tuka said:

Nice work there. Saves a lot of time compared to recreating all details entirely and still preserves suprisingly lots of the original.

 

Just to be sure, this is a Photoshop plugin or seperate tool you're working with?

 

Separate tool. I do one scale without noise reduction and one with it on. Then in photoshop I blend the two layers together, using a layer mask made by edge detection for blending the noisy layer with the one that has had noise reduced. This keeps most of the detail like scratches while getting rid of most of the color noise that makes the stock textures look so bad. Now I'm leaning towards doing a bit more tweaking by hand. Some of the details like the leather on the 190 needs to be masked off on its own.

 

2 hours ago, II./JG77_motoadve said:

How do you install it?

I cannot see a difference, mods ON, and I copied the files to the specific folders.

Does anyone see a difference in VR?

 

Drag the data folder in the archive into the root install folder; steam\steamapps\common\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad

[=gRiJ=Roman-]

Very excited about this project! Thanks a lot!

[TheSNAFU]

7 hours ago, PA_Spartan- said:

Very excited about this project! Thanks a lot!

 

Yep! 109's soon?

[PA_Keko_]

Looking good!!! Thank you!!!!! 

[Jade_Monkey]

Very nice!

 

Love how the new cockpits look. It's a subtle change but definitely worth it!

[Tomi_099]

Thanks a lot!

[Picchio]

On 7/19/2018 at 1:39 AM, LizLemon said:

 

 

I had been following a similar approach when I attempted to rework the Folgore's cockpit. I was aiming for a dirtier overall look and I also had the (vain) ambition of painting every texture from scratch, but I gave up on it for the moment.

In this version I kept some of the new textures I made for the front dash and a few hood frame elements.

I'd like to share the humble result here, I hope you don't mind!

Preview screenshots inside the spoiler.

 

Spoiler

 

 

Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g1o19Ff0nu9ACFP8uf6eA_xrkJCM4SsO/view?usp=sharing

Edited September 12, 2018 by Picchio

[Juuuxie]

This is all incredible and I'm excited for any upcoming cockpits! Might I ask how this is done or if I can get linked to a certain forum post about modding and how to get into it? I'd kind of like to experiment with something like Riksen has done as posted above.

[Asgar]

seeing that makes me hope that we'll get 4K textures for all the cockpits as standard at some point in the future

[Yankee_One]

Nice work mate!

 

Thank you

[Picchio]

Hi all, again I wish to share this here in a spirit of participation and not to detract from the OP's work. In case mine isn't adequate to the quality aimed for, I'll create another thread.

So, here's the result for the cockpit of MiG-3.
Here I experimented a bit more with the process of detail masking: the original texture was re-sampled just once using a moderate noise reduction. On top of it, there are two layer masks, one for fine details, and the other with "everything else" (simply, I chose to invert the selection of the first mask). Both masks were treated with the same amount of Reduce Noise filter, duplicated two times, filtered (Smart Sharpen, Noise), and adjusted in opacity when layered.
For now, I'm happy enough with the result. No new textures were made here. With the cockpit, I included a similarly modified texture for the oil-on-windscreen damage effect.
Let me know what you think.

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Burqg8S3LC8IbQrMPdK1SgOwuiySuBf6/view?usp=sharing

 

In-game images in the spoiler: hi-res for your enjoyment, so they're better viewed fullscreen.

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited September 20, 2018 by Picchio

[SCG_motoadve]

Does anyone see the difference in VR?

I have downloaded them and looks the same.

Maybe because the low resolution of VR?

[Thad]

19 minutes ago, II./JG77_motoadve said:

Maybe because the low resolution of VR?

Uhmm…. could be. ?

[J2_Oelmann]

Uh, awesome.

[E69_julian57]

Hello, this mod works with JSEMG..?

Edited September 20, 2018 by E69_julian57

[Luger1969]

Hi Picchio.

1]Before I install-paste the mod,  I will make a backup of the  original files.

2]Do I delete the original  dds file before I paste in the mod. I see the names are different from the original so they wont overwrite, must only the new dds files be in the folder or can both (the orginal and new) be?

Edited September 20, 2018 by Luger1969

[Picchio]

The mod is JSGME compatible, yes. The folder structure is unaltered.

 

For a manual install, just drop the data folder in your main IL-2 directory. You won't have to back up anything as these files are normally packaged and read by the game from a different archive. To uninstall, just delete the copied content.

 

[Luger1969]

Thanks Picchio

[dan54800]

On ‎9‎/‎5‎/‎2018 at 6:43 AM, LizLemon said:

Il2m42, Fw-190a3, Pe-2s87

https://mega.nz/#!7CBiXAIS!AGpAi9CCgQtnYoRxNx_lY0a0TAOIUXLGwu2a0OKDjdE

Hello LizLemon,

I congratulate you on your work on the cockpit layout of the Focke-Wulf 190A-3. However, if you
want to achieve a "historically" perfect cockpit, you will have to make further modifications.
Indeed, this cockpit is not quite consistent with that of a real Fw-190A-3. I was able to
participate during two and a half years in the realization of the mod pack Fw-190 & Ta-152 of
Claymore for IL2-1946. This is really the reference when it comes to Focke-Wulf cockpits, all or
almost all versions are detailed (even some prototypes).

For more details, I tell you the interesting links, namely:

REFERENCE COCKPITS FW-190 'HISTORIC' - Pack Fw 190 & Ta 152 from C6-CLAYMORE

http://www.checksix-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=322&t=173357

http://www.checksix-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=156711

Page 1 et suivantes : Cockpit du FW-190A-4

Page 4 et suivantes : Cockpit du Fw-190A-3

Page 5              : Une vue du Fw-190A-2

Page 6              ; Cockpits des Fw-190A-5 et A-6

Page 8 et suivantes : Cockpits des Fw-190A-7, A-8 et A-9

Page 6 et suivantes : Cockpit du Fw-190D-9

Page 10 et suivantes : Cockpits des Fw-190D-11 et D-13 et A-8 "Mistel"

Page 11 et suivantes : Cockpits des Fw-190F-8 et F9 et Ta-152H-0

Page 13 et suivantes : Cockpit du Ta-152H-1

Page 14 et suivantes : Cockpit du FW-190V-13

Page 15 et suivantes : Cockpit du Fw-190A-2

If you are interested in further information, I will ask you to give me your email address so that
I can send you documentation.
Friendships.

DAN

 

[DD_Arthur]

Nice one Picchio!

 

Really enjoying these 4k 'pits

[sammydee]

Great mod, thanks.