a year of render96

as the name of the release implies this release was meant to be done back in june 29 which also happens to be my birthday and when i also joined the render 96 project, given the many celebrations and happenings of the community i eventually had to accept i would have to delay some progress till now.

Does this mean the end of the texture pack?
of course not, texture sources will continue to be added as time goes on and these keep being discovered. since the research that goes into finding these and shipping times are quite extensive this can take a while, not to mention that each image has to be verified to make sure they are a match, all this thanks to the members of the team constantly researching. @roovahlees @Fanamel are two names that come to mind.

What does this release do?
well the purpose of this release is to signify that i am at a point with the texture pack where i am both very proud and at peace with what the team and i have been able to accomplish, in shorter terms i worked in everything i wanted to work for the texture pack and so i want to make significant to show that, thus this release.

i will continue to iterate and maintain the repo as time goes on and as i mentioned i'll try adding whatever texture sources make their way to us.
i would also like to answer some common questions that i've not fully addressed before or things that i never get to share but always wanted to.

Why did you go with this aesthetic?
well the texture sources being a big factor of this texture pack's creation i soon realized that a very soft and stylized look for the project was in direct contrast with the texture sources so i decided that if we could not find a texture source the next best thing we could hope for is to aim for stylized realism since this approach would make each source look very fitting next to each other as well of trying our hardest to stay as close to the original look when possible. another one of the reasons as to why this approach was suggested was because we wanted to differentiate ourselves from other texture packs of the time that had the same goal in mind, since there already is another project which planned to create a drawn texture pack for sm64 we considered it not healthy for the community to have multiple people doing their own version of the same thing so the approach mentioned earlier was the one we ended up going with.

What inspired the start the project and what kept the motivation?
since i am only one member of the team i can't speak for everybody on the team, each member might have a very different reason as to why work on the project but at least as far as me goes part of the inspiration to make this texture pack came from curiosity regarding upscaling as well of an admiration and respect for the work of Nerrel in majora's mask.
at the risk of abridging heavily the history of the texture pack i would love to share some of the events that lead us to this point or at least the most notable ones in no particular order. during the events of last year i developed a keen interest in upscaling, me wanting a reason to test these out and getting as familiar with these as i could i decided to take on upscaling sm64 textures and being very impressed with the results, seeing as to how people were aiming to upgrade the games visuals i decided to contribute in whichever way i could and so RESRGAN the base of this project started, which that also only started as a fork of another project the cleaner aesthetics project which then merged with Render96 shortly before i joined the team, it was then when some very significant discoveries by @Fanamel were made, the texture libraries for a significant portion of the textures used in game, over time seeing as to how restoring the game textures was a very real possibility work began on my side to start adding the textures, @ThreePlanet66 @MaxiGamerWiiU @ayekerik soon followed researching and helping out whenever they could while in the background dorf pik and fanamel started acquiring some of the cds to continue, amidst all of this @roovahlees still not officially a part of the team often helped us out with finding more and generally just finding texture match after texture match until eventually he asked to join us (should've been us begging roovah to officially join but appreciated nonetheless lol) time passed and we prepared everything for a release sharing all our progress by the day and the it happened, pik had received the wabi cds and suddenly we had nearly half of lethal lava land to restore, it was tough but the first release of the pack was done.
later as we kept moving forward we started to focus more on paintings @jy-company had decided to make all of the frames which the texture pack now uses for every painting it was rather odd since jy thought of the frames as temporary but i like them a lot, the game having as many textures as it does skyboxes started to become more of a priority since matches were there which @roovahlees was very helpful with even doing some skyboxes of his own. skyboxes were tough to make but so far i haven't mentioned some of the craziness it took the team for, at the very beginning of recreating the skyboxes i always wanted to find the match for wet dry world with how this was one of my favourites and all, so i started how any sane person would tackle this issue... i decided to search for wdw by looking at every single photo of casares spain (which at the time it was believed to be wdw), after being very grumpy and looking for several hours at all the photos of the place taken before 96 i managed to get in contact with a stock photographer who confirmed to me that yeah it was not casares i decided to call it quits, with over 2gbs of jpegs i had downloaded to check if one of those were the source as well of looking into some other places roovahlees suggested to me i decided to just make a wdw skybox while the real source was found which at the time i was pretty much giving up hope for.
but by far the biggest highlight and curveball i never expected was charlycn just finding the source through my same method but looking elsewhere and as such wdw was finally found, if you follow me on twitter and you are reading this i want to apologize for retwitting like 30 times the same thing about the wdw discovery when it happened, to say i was excited would be underselling it. stuff like this is sort of what kept my motivation for the project, early on in the project i pushed myself very hard to finish as much of the texture as i could since i was afraid that i would not be able to finish the texture pack with all of what was going on around me which in the long run meant that i just couldn't continue the texture pack with the same passion that i had back when i started despite now being aware that i could continue working on this so i took a break for a month, during that month i really didn't feel like doing much for the project and was considering to push leadership to someone else but that month also intertwined with the month @jy-company started to do a lot more work for the project which seeing his commits in the server cheered me up a bit knowing that even if i didn't get to do all of what i wanted nor finish what i started the team could deliver where i couldn't. eventually i gained back my footing and decided to carry on this time learning that its ok if i didn't have the same kind of time to work on the project, contributing is still contributing.

i really didn't cover even half of the struggles and tales of this texture pack but i wanted to share this since i don't often talk about it, this project has been very helpful to me and has helped me gain back some of that lost drive that once made me so eager to keep pushing myself and to learn, i often felt at my wits end with this texture pack tasking myself with stuff i clearly was not ready for but as a result of that i feel i am better now than when i started and i can't thank @DorfDork enough for letting me be a part of this, idk what you saw on me man but all i can tell you is thank you.