Metroid Prime 1,2,3 and Trilogy HD Texture Pack

Malkierian

So I love the Metroid Prime series, and recently heard about the possibility of custom textures. Went searching, no one's done the Trilogy yet. So, I decided to try it myself. I initially tried ESRGAN, but quickly lost heart because it just couldn't live up to my standards of quality. However, shortly after that, I found TopazLabs' Gigapixel AI, and man, what a difference. And since the work was done, I figured I'd share.

This is just a rough first draft, really. I fully plan on going through and touching up as many textures as I can. But the 4x upscales with Gigapixel are all done, and it still looks fantastic, even without the manual touch-up. Even after weeding out all of the obviously junk images (and let me tell you, there were TONS of them), and the mips I didn't need to upscale (since we have a tool on the forum that automatically puts mipmaps into DDS files), there are still almost 25k textures that were upscaled, including font textures (15k in MP3 alone).

As mentioned already, these are DDS files, but I compared to the PNGs myself, and there was virtually no quality loss. They also contain embedded mipmaps, it cuts down on the file count. Also, thanks to using DDS, Preload Custom Textures is not necessary, and indeed not possible if you don't have at least 12 GB of RAM on your computer. If you want to preload, I suggest moving the folders for the games you're not planning on playing into the Load parent folder, where they won't be touched.

Screenshots: (Show Spoiler)

Yes, I know those are all from Corruption, but that's what I was doing when I finished up, so that was the first I took pictures of. However, I did do this transition comparison of the Phazon Mines cutscene from MP1 as well: Video on Dropbox

Speaking of the separate games, I can confirm that the textures are interchangeable with their standalone, and to make that easy (if you like playing one standalone over trilogy), I made separate ZIPs of each individual game's textures in their respective game's region-free folder name.

Also of note, unfortunately the menu backgrounds and endings of all the games (and the intro for Echoes) are all pre-rendered videos, so unfortunately there's no way to upscale those (trying to save the PNGs of each video frame and upscale them seems to be able to load fast enough, but it results in some pretty annoying visual glitches).

Files: (Show Spoiler)

If you come across any portions of any of the games that you think are not upscaled, let me know where, and if you know how, send me a rip of the textures in that area so I can double check.

Kayael · 05-20-2019, 06:54 AM #2

A big thank you for doing this ! I recently finished MP1 but I'll give this a try for 2 and 3 when I'll replay them !

Malkierian · 05-20-2019, 08:20 AM #3

Let me know how it goes! I plan on starting the overhaul soon, so you might get to test some of them out, if you want.

Zombie · (This post was last modified: 05-20-2019, 02:27 PM by Zombie.)

you are a very good dude... partly because MP trilogy is amazing and this desperately needed to be done... but also because I had toyed with this for a little while and gave up when I realized I'd have to dump the textures from all 3 games, so I'm super happy I don't have to do this myself

and tangentially, you are correct and your embedded images don't seem to be set up correctly... try "{img}link{/img}" but with the correct brackets [ and ]

edit: out of curiosity, what was the upscale? 4x? 6x?

Malkierian · (This post was last modified: 05-20-2019, 03:12 PM by Malkierian.)

(05-20-2019, 02:25 PM)Zombie Wrote: you are a very good dude... partly because MP trilogy is amazing and this desperately needed to be done... but also because I had toyed with this for a little while and gave up when I realized I'd have to dump the textures from all 3 games, so I'm super happy I don't have to do this myself

and tangentially, you are correct and your embedded images don't seem to be set up correctly... try "{img}link{/img}" but with the correct brackets [ and ]

edit: out of curiosity, what was the upscale? 4x? 6x?

I used the forum's "Insert Picture" button, and it put in exactly what you described, so it must not be that. I'll fiddle with it, but that's the reason I put the Imgur link in, since the preview also didn't show that stuff coming up.

Yeah, not only did you have to play through all three games, but you had to make sure to go into every single room, because each one could have a different texture file for some unique feature in it, as well as all the special upgrades (the Sonic Boom, for instance). And on top of that, that static effect that happens every time you come out of morph ball, or got too close to the electric ball creatures (or any other static time), or were looking at a portal in Echoes, or got rain on your visor, or jumped in or out of water, the effects were generated in real time, but Dolphin still treated them like textures, so it was saving those to disk every single time. I had to set up a keyboard shortcut that toggled the texture dumping so I could disable it when encountering those things. But, I think it was, and will be, worth it.

The upscale was 4x. I don't think my system could handle 6x (especially for some of them that were 1024x512 or bigger), or more specifically, that Gigapixel could handle them (the way it loads them before processing them makes it difficult to do images in bulk). But it's going to be in the manual overhaul from now on that's going to make the bigger difference, and is going to take much longer.

EDIT: Oh, gosh dangit, since it was moved here from the general forum, I can't edit the original post anymore.

Zombie · 05-20-2019, 03:31 PM #6

(05-20-2019, 03:09 PM)Malkierian Wrote: I used the forum's "Insert Picture" button, and it put in exactly what you described, so it must not be that.

you don't need to upload the picture, you can just put a hyperlink to the image in the tags and it works perfectly, that's how I set up the embedded imgur previews on my hd pack's post

(05-20-2019, 03:09 PM)Malkierian Wrote: The upscale was 4x. I don't think my system could handle 6x

4x seems to be the sweet spot, imo... 6x is a huge increase in size for a minimal gain in detail

(05-20-2019, 03:09 PM)Malkierian Wrote: more specifically, that Gigapixel could handle them (the way it loads them before processing them makes it difficult to do images in bulk). But it's going to be in the manual overhaul from now on that's going to make the bigger difference, and is going to take much longer.

yeah, gigapixel hates huge queues and commits tons of information about the list to ram... if you're going to keep working with gigapixel, I recommend dividing the files up into a few folders to save you some mental energy... personally, I start by organizing the textures into subfolders based on their type (the final number in the file name)... simple enough to do in windows explorer (e.g. search for "_4.png" and drop all those results into a folder, etc)... the only folder that should have tons of files and require a bit more attention are _14.png's... this has the added benefit of making a lot of the UI/text textures easy to find, since they're usually one of the texture types with few results

(05-20-2019, 03:09 PM)Malkierian Wrote: EDIT: Oh, gosh dangit, since it was moved here from the general forum, I can't edit the original post anymore.

weird, oh well

Malkierian · 05-20-2019, 04:58 PM #7

(05-20-2019, 03:31 PM)Zombie Wrote: you don't need to upload the picture, you can just put a hyperlink to the image in the tags and it works perfectly, that's how I set up the embedded imgur previews on my hd pack's post

I wasn't uploading them. In the editor, there's the row of buttons that inserts bbcode (bold, italics, alignment, etc), and there's one that does that for image tags. But, looking back, it turns out that I was using the Imgur post link, not the direct link to the image. Silly me XD. I fixed it.

(05-20-2019, 03:31 PM)Zombie Wrote: I recommend dividing the files up into a few folders to save you some mental energy... personally, I start by organizing the textures into subfolders based on their type (the final number in the file name)...

Hmm, I had started toying with the idea of splitting them up, but I hadn't thought about doing so by their suffix. I'll have to go back and do that. If only there was a way to batch Gigapixel. Hopefully they'll improve the interface as time goes by. Do you have any info on what each one means? I looked in Bighead's thread, but all he posted in there was a link to a Wikipedia page that was too technical to make any sense in reference to Dolphin.

themanuel · 05-20-2019, 11:29 PM #8

This seems like a great time to restart MP3, which I had put off after playing just a couple of hours years ago.

Thanks for sharing that.

Zombie · (This post was last modified: 05-21-2019, 01:36 AM by Zombie.)

(05-20-2019, 04:58 PM)Malkierian Wrote: Hmm, I had started toying with the idea of splitting them up, but I hadn't thought about doing so by their suffix. I'll have to go back and do that. If only there was a way to batch Gigapixel. Hopefully they'll improve the interface as time goes by. Do you have any info on what each one means?

not offhand, sorry... I looked into it a few months ago and the short of it is each number denotes some specific type of texture, but I can't seem to find the guide I saw... if I can dig it up again I'll send it your way

edit: this also has the added benefit of making it easy to delete the "fake" textures (usually completely black pngs dumped for each frame of cutscenes), those all end up in their own folder

Malkierian · 05-21-2019, 03:23 AM **#10**

(05-21-2019, 01:34 AM)Zombie Wrote: not offhand, sorry... I looked into it a few months ago and the short of it is each number denotes some specific type of texture, but I can't seem to find the guide I saw... if I can dig it up again I'll send it your way

edit: this also has the added benefit of making it easy to delete the "fake" textures (usually completely black pngs dumped for each frame of cutscenes), those all end up in their own folder

Yes, aside from the strange resolutions that they are saved in (320x224 or something like that? When everything else is a power of 2). But it makes it even easier to find the "on-the-fly" textures (I was using the suffixes to find those even without sifting them into their own folders). I already had some Java routines set up to sift out the "shadow map" textures, as I like to call them, that have all that magenta-based "transparency", too.