Mass Effect 2

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JimbobJeffers

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JimbobJeffers

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About this mod

A high quality 4k re-texture of Miranda's default outfit and head/hair, designed to look as close to the original as possible while correcting some minor errors.

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This mod replaces Miranda's default suit and head/hair with new 2K and 4K textures. The suit was repainted from scratch with a graphics tablet, tracing over the original. Every effort has been made to ensure that the new textures look just like the original ones - check the images to see for yourself!

I have also created an alternate version of the suit which replaces some of the leather textures with more fluffy fabric, like in the promo artwork.


Installation
For quick and painless installation of the mod, I recommend using Mass Effect Modder.
An alternate download is included with the .dds files, for installation with other software like ME3Explorer.

ALOT Users: ALOT includes the "Promo" version of this mod, with a minor edit by Jenya to remove shiny highlights from the edges of the eyelids. If you'd like the vanilla-accurate "Promo", or the "Default" version of Ultimate Miranda, you will need to download them separately here and install them after ALOT.


Process (Suit)
I spent many, many hours on this mod, but to briefly summarise the work behind it... The original diffuse texture was upscaled to use as a base. Then I masked out every different element of the suit. Using a graphics tablet I repainted them, constantly sampling the colours of the original to maintain accuracy. Then I went back and cleaned it all up, and finally I carefully blended in textures from PBR sites like Poliigon, such as metal, leather, and other fabrics.

The normal map was recreated from scratch by drawing out a custom height map. Simply running the diffuse texture through a normal map generator would have produced horribly inaccurate results, instead these filters need to be fed with properly designed greyscale maps. Then the normals from the same PBR textures were blended in too.

The specular maps were made using the new 4K diffuse as a base, with the upscaled original specular textures mixed in to retain the surface wear. Levels were adjusted to match the original so that surfaces are just as glossy or rough as before.

I also pulled the UV map from the mesh (which tells the software how to place the 2D textures around the 3D model) and used it to make some minor corrections - for example, originally the underside of the black belt overlaps with the white suit, and there were seam issues most noticeably on her back.


Process (Head/Hair)
The face, scalp and hair textures were upscaled using a combination of the latest AI upscaling tools, such as ESRGAN's various models and Gigapixel. Each ESRGAN model is better suited to a particular task, so I carefully blended together the results to get the best of all of them. These upscales were then edited to more closely match the original textures. I opted for upscaling rather than repainting as there is so much fine detail in a skin and hair texture that is hard to reproduce in HD without noticeably changing the appearance, and these textures are already larger in scale so upscalers have more to work with.

Huge thanks to CreeperLava for helping me get started with AI upscaling!


Other Mods
Ultimate Miranda is available for Mass Effect 3 too.
I have also made Facial Hair HD for Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, and Holograms HD for Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3.