Using AI to create and edit textures.

[pwillard]

Also, as we have seen so far, you would get the best results if all of the UV Islands in the Texture Map are oriented the same way, which is often not the case.

[CSRX]

Awesome, I can finally be really good at weathering details..

(obviously kidding, I'll die before I use AI for artwork...)

[ossie]

Shawn's comment here and Marek's comment on the modelling thread about not wanting to hand over a process he enjoys to AI raises an interesting point about AI in the sim (and everywhere else for that matter). Doing reskins is my favourite part of this hobby and if I could ask AI to create 50 autoracks giving a mix of all the RRs, 40 with graffiti & 10 clean I wouldn't do it because that creation process is what I enjoy. If I can get it to remove shadows from the racks, or (please, please) effectively remove handrails and the shadows they cast from a loco photo to make a reskin faster, I wouldn't be able to say yes to that quickly enough. I'm sure though there'd be people who'd be happy to have AI knock out an entire fleet of freight cars for them and others who won't let it do a thing for them. How AI, the sim and our attitudes towards it evolve over the next year or so is going to be very interesting to watch.

[pwillard]

Well, the fact is, you can't avoid reality... and our current reality is that AI is getting better at its job every day. Its job, in my current opinion, is to take on mundane tasks that take time and effort and do what it can to eliminate the drudge work to achieve 'quick' satisfaction. Whether doing graphic or coding work, some people are looking for results without all the work. Hopefully, this leads to a desire to learn "how it's made" instead of "I can be lazy now".

This is precisely where most of the complaints are stemming from as well. Some people get true enjoyment (endorphin endorsement) from putting in the effort on their own, without assistance. Therefore, I feel we will always see both sides at odds.

We have also seen that we still get mostly "not what we wanted" from AI, so the artists and coders who put in the effort still have the majority, and AI has not made them redundant.

I'm not against AI, personally, but I will never leave everything I do *up* to AI. In 2025, that would be careless and dumb.

[oper190]

Since I haven't been that good at adding weather effects my models, I'm giving AI a shot at adding weather effects to my own textures
My boxcar as made:
Shape Viewer054.jpg After having AI add weather effects, rust, and dirt and grime as two separate layers:
Shape Viewer053.jpgGranted Hart RL would normally not let one of their cars get this grungy.

[scfe_fan]

Here is the first ever house I've actually done. Up until now, all of my scenery objects have been foliage or railroad related objects such as stations, platforms, and bridges. The textures on this were created completely in ChatGPT. It is supposed to resemble a deep south house from the 1920's-1930's.

KeysHouse1.jpg

[pwillard]

Apart from the porch railing projecting onto the house's wood siding, it's not bad.

[scfe_fan]

Apart from the porch railing projecting onto the house's wood siding, it's not bad.

I saw that when I was getting the textures from the AI and came to the conclusion that it was something that I could live with as this house isn't going to be all that close to the tracks and it probably wouldn't be noticeable from any real distance.

[johnnyboy99]

image.png
Gemini did a surprisingly good job generating a side texture from a photo

[ossie]

Where's everyone at with their experimentation? I've been trying a number of programs out and decided I'd give a paid version of Topaz Photo AI a run as I want to clean up a lot of old photos and slides other than just using it for train sim content. As far as the TS hobby goes, after a very short session last night it ticks the boxes of being able to upscale smaller photos with a high degree of accuracy. Attached is a 640 x 440 to 3840 x 2670 transfer for instance. Assuming the redone image will attach here at the right size, you can see that it still isn't ideal for a reskin as there's quite a significant loss of detail due to the original small size, but my guess would be anything around the 1000 x 700ish size would come up very usable.

apxu153056.jpg apxu153056-topaz-upscale-6x-denoise-sharpen.jpg

I make that size guess because I also tried converting a 1024 texture file to 2048 via Topaz and was delighted with the result. Unfortunately (and probably obviously) ace & dds aren't supported so I had to do the extra step of converting my test to bmp format. Timewise it's probably not much different to the regular process of increasing the size of a texture BUT it also did a great job of sharpening it up as well. I couldn't find fault with the result of test #1. It'd have included a before & after but both are too large to use as attachments.

On the downside, (and hopefully there is a way to do it), in the quick try out I gave it last night, there was no obvious way to "chat" to it like we can with google gemini. I was hoping for a one size fits all package that would allow me to ask it remove shadows, handrails, add weathering etc but if that ability is there I didn't see it. Given the amount of time the program took to download and the mass of tutorials I've found, I'm sure I've only scratched the surface so hopefully those additional abilities are in there somewhere.

Have any of you come up with any different programs that you are happy with and/or that give a fuller range of features from a texture creation, editing point of view?

[pwillard]

There is a similar tool called UPSCAYL that does a reasonably good job at upscaling images. https://upscayl.org/

[EldoradoRailroad]

Except for the color shift with some of the blue lettering I would say, pretty darn good, sold!
I wonder if things like varying degrees of AO can be "faked" onto the texture as well?

Steve

[ossie]

There is a similar tool called UPSCAYL that does a reasonably good job at upscaling images. https://upscayl.org/

Upscayl was one of the packages I looked at as well Pete. IIRC when I was asking the AI about the best packages for working on old photos & slides, it gave me Topaz & Upscayl as the 2 most popular options.

[ossie]

Except for the color shift with some of the blue lettering I would say, pretty darn good, sold!
I wonder if things like varying degrees of AO can be "faked" onto the texture as well?

Steve

It wouldn't surprise me at all Steve. Some of what GG has been able to do with "faking" has been amazing. I picked that container as an example because it was starting at such a small size that I was interested to see where I could get it to. I'm sure you could probably instruct one of the programs to recreate the details on the container with more realism... especially if you had a shot of a similar container.... but finding a package that allowed those chatbot functions and the editing/upscaling etc all in one place seems to be the challenge. I didn't have any time to get any further into Topaz last night but I'll give it a good run across the weekend and HOPEFULLY find a way to talk with it about specific edits.

In the short term I think it's going to be worth the price just to get all the old family photos upscaled and "modernised" and then we'll see what it can do for sim contents.

[pwillard]

A lot of the time, we are dealing with really old photographic sources, since in many cases that's all we have left as reference material. In many cases, these sources are poorly scanned or faded photos. I ran a test of an old, low-quality photo of Jack Benny and his wife. Here is the before and after.

jack benny.jpg Benny-upscayl.png

This was with UPSCAYL *after* I let CHATGPT tweak the source image. I could have asked to remove the sepia tones, but I actually liked it.