[HD Project] Animal Crossing: City Folk (RUUE01)

[yttrium]

Announcing Animal Crossing: City Folk HD, my first HD texture project!

I started playing Animal Crossing: City Folk last year with Dolphin, many years after having played the original and Wild World when growing up. It wasn't until recently that I discovered Dolphin supports texture replacement, and so I started my journey into HD-ifying this game!

This project is a bit different than a lot of other projects in this subforum. Rather than try to add an HD skin on top of the base game, my project strives to painstakingly recreate every texture, 100% vectorized, before re-rendering them in HD.

There are a lot of advantages to this. The textures can be infinitely scaled up in case someone wants to play at an even higher resolution, and textures are very easily tweakable. The downside is obvious - it takes a lot more work to recreate the world using shapes rather than using a brush. However, with an art style like Animal Crossing, I feel it's both possible and worth it.

For example, on the left is what clovers in the original game look like, and then on the right is what a fully vectorized recreation looks like, at sixteen times the original resolution.


Project Goals

• Recreate every texture in the game with vectors
• Increase every texture's resolution 4x in each dimension (16x overall resolution)
• Create textures for every stage of every season, each of which has a different set of textures
• Stay as true to the original texture as sanely possible
  

It's a little ambitious, but there are a few key points that make this project more feasible than it seems:

• Animal Crossing uses a very flat theme, with only a few colors and sane curves.
• There are three tree types, but each season only changes colors, not shapes. It's easy to create new textures for a new season by simply changing the colors of the shapes in the old one.
• Almost all characters have very simple expressions with only a few flat colors.
• All shading is handled by the engine itself. Very little lighting is pre-baked.
• Almost all text in the game actually uses a free font.
• Almost all text in the game is recolored on the fly from the original white texture containing the alphabet.
  

I'm going to set up a GitHub repo soon so that others can contribute to the project if they'd like. GitHub will host my file downloads, which are actually incredibly small thanks to the game using flat colors. For now though, you can download what I've accomplished so far here:
Download Animal Crossing: City Folk HD v0.1
Gallery

How to contribute:

• When the GitHub repo goes live, clone it locally and then open up my PSDs so you can get a feel for how I vectorize content. Then, try it yourself on textures I haven't yet edited!
• The most important way you can help is by running the newest build of Dolphin, enabling texture dumping, and then playing through your own save. Once you've got a bunch of textures, zip them up and send them to me! Because of the nature of Animal Crossing, it's really really hard for me to encounter every texture in my own game, but if you give me your textures and saves, I can create new textures much more easily for you.
  

Credits:
Everything made by me from scratch in Photoshop CC 2014 if not mentioned below.
Main logo clock background and City Folk plate background: bgfons
Main logo wood background: bgfons

[DragonFireXY]

This is really nice. I saw your post on a certain sub, and I'm wondering did you keep the secret in this upload?

[yttrium]

(06-08-2015, 01:21 AM)DragonFireXY Wrote: This is really nice. I saw your post on a certain sub, and I'm wondering did you keep the secret in this upload?

The secret is not in v0.1 because the texture containing the secret hasn't actually been made HD yet. Once I remake that texture, the secret will be in.

[UltraJake]

Secrets, huh? 

[archmeister94]

Looks good I hope you continue with it but Im new to dolphin so how do I load these textures in my game?

[MayImilae]

Place the extracted images into [your global user directory]/Load/Textures/RUUE01, and turn on "Load Custom Textures" in Dolphin.

[shangry]

It's looking really good already The trees look beautiful. If we ever do a playthrough of this, you can bet your ass we'll use your texture pack

[Kyben]

Looks great! I'd love this for the Gamecube Animal Crossing. Just a font replacement would be great as the text at a high resolution hurts my eyes.

[Phantop]

Is there any way I could help? I don't really know how to make these textures but would love to help. Do you think you could tell me anything to look at from a very basic level? Thanks in advance!

[Phantop]

Is this project dead?