[HD Texture Project] Xenoblade Chronicles (v5.0U - May 17, 2014)

[Bighead]

This bar gave me more trouble than I could have ever imagined. I spent so much time trying to blend the dark grooves with the light ones and it just wasn't happening. I tried merging almost every possible level of alpha in the black and white spectrum and even throwing in some gray... it never looked correct despite everything I tried. I ended up redrawing this entire thing with a pencil tool pixel by pixel trying to get it to look correct. Being stubborn I never looked at the original texture until I gave up. There is no blending them, the default texture is just so blurry its hard to tell, so at the end I blurred it a bit. It doesn't look too bad, better than the original, but if anyone else wants to try to make something better then I wish you the best of luck.
http://i.imgur.com/xxQc13s.png

Ooh and I almost forgot, they aren't evenly spaced because the game didn't like that. I had to space each one of them one by one to get them to line up with the socketed gem.

---

Last thing for the night, updated the Affinity pack to include the 4 missing bars.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/g4z04kl81xbdllt/Affinity_v3.zip

[frozenwings]

Uhhhh, wow? Did you actually go through and take screen shots of every person on the affinity screen in upper bionis? That's nuts. And awesome.

I was downloading this and I was like "Eh, this is pretty big for a few affinity textures. Bighead trying to sneak a virus in on me. What a meanie." But instead I get this awesomeness.

I'm not even to upper bionis yet, but I'm going to be soon. I'm kind of excited now.

I also got to check out all of your box textures, they look really good. Even though that bigger bar gave you some trouble, it still looks way better than the original. So good job.

[oblivion254]

I tried to get this to work but I guess I messed up somewhere the only noteable things I think I did were changing from SX4P01 to SX4E01. Anyone willing to help I would be glad to skype or anything to make it faster. I am kicking myself for never playing this before.
http://i.imgur.com/2vOejwK.jpg

[narcku]

You're playing with HD textures, right? (Load custom textures on?)
Try using OpenGL graphic plugin instead of D3D.

Edit: Man.. just installed 4.5U pack. Who made that ugly grass..? Now I can't even "undo" the grass change because I have no idea which file it is among 19k+ textures -_-.
Edit 2: Nvm.. found it. leonseer's grass is the culprit.

[oblivion254]

When I use OpenGL and Load Custom Textures it doesn't load the custom textures.
http://i.imgur.com/fuWe9PT.jpg

[narcku]

Huh.. I'm pretty sure that's a custom texture. See the RT-LT Button? That's gotta be custom textures from X360 Button Pack.
It's probably blurry because of.. your native resolution setting? Change it to 2x or above. Use AA and AF too for better result.

[Bighead]

(04-26-2014, 02:15 PM)frozenwings Wrote: Uhhhh, wow? Did you actually go through and take screen shots of every person on the affinity screen in upper bionis? That's nuts. And awesome.

I was downloading this and I was like "Eh, this is pretty big for a few affinity textures. Bighead trying to sneak a virus in on me. What a meanie." But instead I get this awesomeness.

I'm not even to upper bionis yet, but I'm going to be soon. I'm kind of excited now.

I also got to check out all of your box textures, they look really good. Even though that bigger bar gave you some trouble, it still looks way better than the original. So good job.

Those icons were actually in v2 of the affinity pack I linked awhile back. I even had a screenshot up: http://i.imgur.com/HPSev7p.png

Nobody said anything about it so I assumed they weren't liked very much, because I was uncertain myself. There's something off-putting about them to me, and I think its that the scenery behind the faces remains instead of a white background like the originals. But cleaning it out of that many pictures didn't feel worth the effort when there was so many other things I could be doing, but it is an eventual goal.

Which reminds me. I'm missing both Ma'Crish's and Talonyth's IDs so when you get there, alert me what they are. There's probably a few I'm missing from colony 6 and nopon land too so if you've been keeping those icons just send them all to me eventually. Which (also) reminds me, when you get there and are near the point a Reyn face pops in as a menu border, send me your User/Wii folder and I'll help to look for it. Or a save state, but if were using different revisions it may not work. And since I'm having all kinds of "reminds me", you never let me know how accurate the Ether Mine map was when you were there.

---

Ok so with this bar, I didn't want to go through the pain and agony of the last one so I cheated. I upscaled the original one, and kept blasting it with filters until I was satisfied and convinced that image quality actually improved. Even this took more effort than I thought it would to be honest. When it started to look good I cleaned up some of the generated junk and smoothed the corners, and the result is as how Dunban would put it.. "Not Bad. Not bad at all."
http://i.imgur.com/WLkjeWS.gif

I also hate how these GIF images have like a 10%-20% quality reduction, but I do like the one click comparisons. One thing I also like about this rework is that the gem fits perfectly now, instead of how the left and right borders had some overhang.

Edit: A v2, because I'm nuts about consistency and the first box was horizontally 1 pixel shorter. Also updated the corners so they are all identical.

---

Just gonna edit this post again.. Since I've been doing all these gem bars, figured I'd make a texture for the sockets. Zip with 35 variations as an attachment, original texture filesize is 716 bytes. The new texture complements the new brown bar retexture quite nicely.
http://i.imgur.com/34HgRyX.gif

And to put all this gem crafting crap to rest, I cleaned out the junk surrounding the diamond textures used for gem shards.

[narcku]

(04-26-2014, 08:02 PM)Bighead Wrote: http://i.imgur.com/WLkjeWS.gif

I also hate how these GIF images have like a 10%-20% quality reduction, but I do like the one click comparisons.

Maybe you can try apng?

Though I guess it's not widely supported. Works on latest firefox though.
Welp, as of now only firefox seems to support it

[Bighead]

(04-26-2014, 10:26 PM)narcku Wrote: Maybe you can try apng?

I never even heard of it before, thanks for the heads up. What do you use to create them? And also I do use Firefox as my primary browser, although I do have IE, chrome, and safari installed. This is so I can test changes on my website in each browser, because the program I use to create the pages generates some terrible code so I usually have to go in and fix it. The differences in browsers can sometimes create some undesired effects in one but not the other.

[narcku]

I use apng assembler, just google it, it's less than 1 mb.
Very simple to use, just drag and drop the png files and set the delay.
But the thing is, if other people aren't using firefox then they won't be able to see it