Resizing Assets for MV

I am currently looking at resizing some of the VX Ace asset for use with MV before launch, how would this be done?

Just use Photoshop or any decent art program, they have a resize option..

No, don't do that You cannot resize directly from 32x32 to 48x48 because that is 1.5 times and no program can know what to do with the half pixels. It ends up as one awful mess. Look for a post of mine in the main pre order thread, made yesterday but now several pages back where I explain how it can be done and post an example. I'm on my phone so cannot give you the link.

Oh ok, well that's annoying then.

You might not have to resize since tile-size can be adjusted, we don't know if it's in editor or a TileD is required.

But I'd use Photoshop, or Gimp of some kind to resize.  I would not resize by 1.5 always resize by a factor of 2. 

It would be great if the editor came with a built in rescaler, and scaled a asset down to 48x48/the supported size for x asset.

Unfortunately for us pixel oriented resources will not scale like say a 'vector' asset.  While you could have a rendering function to scale the material, it still would appear cloudly/muddy in or out of the program that uses them.  Data from altering the resolution, 'dpi', and scale cannot be guessed by computers just yet to make up the missing portions when they are shrunk or enlarged.

The best option would be to compare the existing MV resources against them and edit them to 1.5X their original size.  Edited, not rescaled.  This will be more involved than hitting a button and putting in a number to get what you want.  Would you like an example?  I can provide one as soon as the 23rd comes around.

I would LOVE if the editor had the option for different tile sizes and would scale its grid accordingly. I will add it to the next "suggestions for the next RPG Maker" thread when one is created, but I don't know if we'll ever see it. If the developers state "this is the tile size we are going with" for the packaged resources, they would have nothing to gain by making it flexible like that.


I wish I could have included an resource converter in my Ace->MV Converter script too, and while it COULD be done, getting the best quality is the big issue.

I spoke to celina (butchered the name) and according to her, her tile sets for parallaxing would work with this new version of RPG Maker ....

That is because parallax maps work differently and are basically ignoring the editor grid in a lot of ways...

This might be true, but in photoshop I still make 32x32 grids and now will make 48x48, my problem with using say luna or celinas assets is that would the new sprit models not clash .... horribly? the size difference, not the color.

That would be amazing(don't know why anyone would choose to make tile size 48x48, the entire industry's standard is 32, but anyway), however I imagine that enterbrain would be against spending time on a feature like that.

 Where do you get this industry standard stuff from?

Pretty much every map editor, and such uses 32x32, I admit it would be nice to beable to use 64x64 though.

Most map editors I've used were not 32x32.


Can you name 5 editors that strictly use 32x32?

Out of curiosity, what if somebody were to first downsize 32x32 to 24x24, and then resize them to 48x48? Would that be a possible alternative to consider, or would the loss of pixels through downsizing still create the same problem? Does downsizing 1.5 times still have the same half pixel issue as upsizing by 1.5 times?

I'd say you'll get similar issues, because 24 does not go evenly into 32. Actually I'd expect that to give even worse results. It's certainly worth a try for the experiment/educational value ;)

So, I wanted to take stab at this and see if I could come up with something.
 
Opened up an entire tileset sheet in GIMP. Made sure the width/height were linked, then scaled up by 3x for the whole tileset sheet.
 
Original was 512x384
Scaled up was 1536x1152
 
Then, scaled back down by 2. (1x3)/2 = 1.5
Final Product of the tileset sheet was okay, had a touch of blur. Added a filter ->Sharpen with a setting of around 55 (50-60 looks about the right range)
I think it is a decent job for just a quick work on it. If anyone else wanted to try something along that line of thinking that was better with the programs than I am, feel free! It is a good place to start I'd say.

You might have some success throwing the filter on in between the scales, I didn't mess with it too much. 

Because its a quick thing to pull off by using the whole tileset sheet at once, this could make for some easy conversion on any ACE, or on any customs as well.
 

I think the amount of blur caused by that way of enlarging and shrinking is unacceptable. There is no need to increase the scale by so much.  I have had better results doing this:

Upload your graphic to http://waifu2x.udp.jp/  Don't use the version which you can download to your pc, it's rubbish.

Select Medium Noise  For RM resources this seems to give the best results.

Select resize 2x    What this does is eliminate the problem of half pixels.

Save the resulting image.

Open in Gimp.  Resize to the MV standards, so e.g. a tilesheet that had been 512 x 512 now needs to be 768 x 768.  which is the magic 1.5

You could stop there.  However, there is one further step which I do because I'm neurotic about file bloat.

If you compare, you will see that the file size of each tile sheet has shot up fourfold or more.  I therefore upload it to https://tinypng.com/which reduces the file size back down to something like the original.

I have found that there might need to be some minimal tidying up, but it really is minimal.

On the MV pre-order page someone posted an image which had been obtained by upscaling to a large amount and then reducing.  I posted the identical graphics altered using this process and the difference was evident - this way gives a sharper image with much less blurring and without losing some of the details which are lost with the alternative.

@amerk:  That would look really terrible.  You'd lose a lot of information and then try to go above the original size.