Other times, Marin is making hand-crafted textures based on high resolution stock photos or pictures that he’s taken himself. In some cases, they work with what Capcom already made, sharpening the images with a mix of off-the-shelf apps and custom-built tools. Screenshots showing the original Resident Evil 4 and the improved graphics of the HD Project. Even though Capcom published its own PC remaster in 2014, it wasn’t Marin’s idea of a true HD version of the game, so he and a small team have been poring through the game’s files to faithfully update every texture.
“I collected a great number of locations the game’s developers use as source material,” Marin told The Verge.įast forward to 2021, and Marin is now seven years into a project to remaster Resident Evil 4’s blurry GameCube-era graphics into crisp HD, in part using high-resolution photos he’s taken of everything from surfaces and doors to general architecture that seemed to have made their way into the original game. His trips followed in the steps of Capcom, which put bits of real-world architecture found across Europe into Resident Evil 4, which was originally released over 16 years ago. At the Palau Güell in Barcelona, he took meticulous photos, not of the building itself, but of the marble floor and its unique veins. In Wales, he visited Raglan Castle to snap pictures of its stone wall. Albert Marin has taken some very specific vacations.