Some of the game locations were made with midjourney V4 back in the day. And it has an aesthetic I love, but I recently stumbled upon ways to upgrading old locations all within Midjourney to make them a lot better!

With the introduction of Vary (Region) and Zoom out features for Midjourney, I have been experimenting with them as a Photoshop generative fill replacement. But some of the locations I chose to work on I originally generated way back in January / February. These generations are beyond help and Midjourney will not allow me to edit them with these new tools.

Enabling the editing options on old generations

But I found a way. As a side effect, using these steps for upgrading old locations, I found that I generally end up with a way superior image!

Upgrading old locations midjourney original

First, I need to go back and find out the original generation. As you can see, the edit options are completely missing. But if I look for the original thumbnail and re-upscale the image!

upgrading old locations midjourney regenerate

I end up with a new, a little bit better version of the original image that has the new, Vary (Region) option available.

Upgrading old locations vary region

If I click on that, and do some meaningless change on the image, I end up with a version of the location that has all of the new editing options available!

Editing old v4 generations in Midjourney

new version

I can now use the pan left/right/up/down and zoom out options on an image generated with Midjourney V4. This is great, as I like the more simplistic style of V4, but need these editing options.

Generally I find that the upgraded versions have a little more coherency. I am not quite sure why. Maybe Midjourney has upgraded their V4 model, or maybe these are generated using V5? Whatever the case I prefer these over the original images. The look more detailed and with the zoom out I can get a little more play space and breathing room along the bottom of the frame. I do not need to use all that new screen real estate, but I prefer to have that option.

Because I am playing with the zoom, this means I do need to model these scenes again in Blender, but it is such a small task that I do not mind.

I would also need to repaint all the shadow passes and reflection masks, but this is also fine. it is such a small task anyway.

This train station for sure is the biggest change, as previously I had painted out the train in Photoshop using generative fill. Midjourney Vary (Region) was a lot more creative in figuring out what could be behind that train. It also added a lot more space to the train station so I can finally position the train better. I did not add zoom out to this image, as the characters are very very deep in the image already.

This method is already used in the City Hall interior & exterior scenes.

Upscaling old generations in Midjourney

Now that Midjourney has introduces their new 2x & 4x upscale, this method allows you to upscale and generations as well!

Upgrading old locations - get the upscale options

When your old generation is missing the new tools, silly perform the very region on some unimportant area and you get access to all the new goodies.

Upgrading old locations the upscale options.

The upscale in Midjourney is very faithful to the original generation. I do wish that they also had an option that added in more detail (this type of generative upscale has been used for the apartment location), but this upscale works quite well for making the old generations look sharper. It is not perfect, not up close, but it is worth performing for most images.

Upgrading old locations the 4x upscale result.
4x upscaled version of the spa exterior

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