#ffxiv Ao Dai

[firelightmuse]

A Night in Kugane 🌙🌹

[biff-adventurer]

i realize a lot of people in the xiv community might not know this, but the ao dai is not a qipao. it's a bit insensitive to wear the ao dai without pants (like, as in, at least jeans or leggings) b/c

1) we must be respectful/not conflate different ethnic styled clothes with one another, as it perpetuates orientalist ideas and attitudes, and

2) vietnamese players will see you and probably ask themselves where your pants are (confirmed from a close friend of mine who was tirelessly harassed on the first day the ao dai was released for validation to wear the ao dai out of cultural context)

if you're looking for chinese style clothes in xiv, such as qipao, you'll want to look at the "far eastern garb for women/men" or the "far eastern socialite's attire", for examples. if you're looking for japanese style or korean style clothes, they're available, too.

the thing is, mixing and matching east asian wardrobes contributes to this orientalist image of the far east. scholar edward said talks a lot about this in his 1978 book "orientalism", where it is summed up as:

"the exaggeration of difference, the presumption of Western superiority, and the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the 'Oriental world'".

there are lots of high fantasy tropes that feed into racist stereotypes and caricatures. just because ffxiv comes from the far east doesn't make it immune to perpetuating certain ideas or images uncritically - but that is an entirely separate discussion, if equally important.

to avoid creating characters and stories that feed into the negativity in this world, research and specificity are your friends. this doesn't limit one's creativity, but rather humanizes your characters and the world we live in.

ultimately, it's your adventure and your choice. whether you take the lore literally or as a suggestion is up to you. either way, i wish you well on your journeys throughout the radiant world of etheirys.

[canmom]

so there's a widely used tool called ReShade which intercepts the DirectX API calls of a game to add additional post-processing effects using the game's frame and depth buffers. basically gives you access to various deferred techniques, with certain technical caveats. common effects include bloom, depth of field, tonemapping, and screen space ambient occlusion.

one of the more ambitious effects is Screen Space Realtime Global Illumination (SSRTGI, or just RTGI), implemented in Marty's Mods. this attempts to simulate diffuse-diffuse interreflection, i.e. how the light from a brightly lit object will spill onto surrounding objects. it's a very important part of rendering bright, colourful scenes.

Global Illumination is usually handled in offline rendering by raytracing, and there's been a lot of excitement in the last few years about the new realtime raytracing acceleration hardware in graphics cards. SSRTGI doesn't use this at all: it knows nothing about the scene geometry beyond the depth buffer. instead it uses raymarching, which steps a ray forward a fixed distance at a time until it discovers an intersection with the depth buffer. Since we're using the depth buffer, the algorithm only knows about the near sides of objects.

This video is a bit rambling but it shows some of the limitations of SSRTGI:

So this has been a fun new toy to play with now my computer can handle it. For example, here's a scene with a bright dancefloor in FFXIV's default renderer, which by default has a strong green tint and desaturated colours.

The Alive preset's colour grade improves matters a lot (this scene doesn't necessarily show the best of it, but removing the green tint and desaturation is a night and day difference throughout the game)...

...but my character's legs should be affected by the bright floor. Enter SSRTGI. I can actually isolate the exact RTGI contribution:

I've turned up the ray length a fair bit compared to the Alive preset's default, since it was a bit too subtle to be worth the performance hit otherwise.

You can see that the SSRTGI models both ambient occlusion and indirect light from bright surfaces. Essentially, each pixel traces a ray in a random direction until it hits a surface visible to the camera. Then, it samples the brightness of that pixel and calculates a light contribution and AO amount. I assume it does some kind of average over neighbouring pixels to smooth out the noise.

The effect is a little subtle, but it makes the scene look more integrated...

...at the cost of a hefty framerate hit (using a 4070Ti; unmodded FFXIV runs at an 1440p ultrawide on an easy 144fps (the monitor refresh rate), without RTGI I can get into the mid 90s, with RTGI it's pretty resolutely locked at 72), and heating my graphics card up to 70-80°C (well within tolerances but it's rare to see a game push it that hard).

The effect may be a little subtle in this scene, which has a lot of high frequency detail and darker materials. It really pops in the Fall Guys crossover, which is a very bright scene.

Note the bright green reflected light on the green cube as a particularly obvious RTGI effect (although the shadow it casts is kinda janky ngl). I should really get a screenshot of the exact RTGI contribution in this area, and create a suite of comparisons like the above.

The RTGI also stands out on bright days in Ul'dah, it does a lot for the Gold Saucer, and generally it makes certain environmental light sources a bit prettier. If you turn it up too much it starts to look a bit silly, since brightly lit floors turn into brilliant torches lighting up nearby walls. But there's a comfy middle ground where it's noticeable without being too extreme. I'm looking forward to seeing how it fares in the colourful areas of the expansions, but this character isn't out of ARR yet.

So, that's cool and all, but toying around with SSRTGI, you really start to feel its limits compared to true raytracing. For example, objects will cast shadows in the indirect lighting, but the specular light contributions are not properly affected by the base game's shadowmaps, so you see speculars in places that you shouldn't. A decent number of surfaces in FFXIV have planar reflections (using the usual technique of rendering the scene inverted through the mirror to a rendertexture), which is nice, but there's no middle ground between 'perfect mirror' and 'rough specular that still reflects the scene'. And of course the other usual limitations of SSRTGI, e.g. a brightly lit surface must be visible to the camera to contribute light.

No, this is nice and all, but the people want real raytracing. Which leads me to wonder is there a way to intercept all the draw calls issued by an application, extract the geometry from them, reformat it for raytracing and feed it into the raytracing hardware - basically replace the game's entire render pipeline with raytracing?

This is going to take some research. It very likely isn't possible, or performant if it was possible, because a lot of smart tech artists have already been working hard to push the limits of ENBSeries, Reshade, etc. (Acerola has a solid video on implementing various effects in Reshade.) But the imp of the perverse in me wants to figure out if it can be done. After all, RenderDoc is capable of intercepting and analysing all the draw calls issued by an application. The question is, how severe is the overhead of on-the-fly translating rasterisation calls into raytracing calls? Most likely absolutely hideous! That's not how you're supposed to use a graphics card!

Since the hardware I develop for very definitely does not support raytracing, I have relatively little idea how you actually write a shader with raytracing. But now I kind of want to find out. If I ever get anywhere beyond idle thoughts, I'll let you know what I find out.

[dstantstargazer]

my ffxiv toxic trait is that whenever i see someone wearing an ao dai in-game, i try to sneakily run by and see what kind of bottoms they're wearing with it, so i can judge them accordingly.

[eorzean-ladies]

Wandering around my favorite city Kugane, I will never ger tired of it’s beauty~

[ralsart]

stream requests by @adellennehocoleux @ocean-in-space @fainfaineant @etani-a @tarot-dancer and @nyamomask

i had alot of technical difficulties so the stream went on to the night til morning @v@ i even had to call it off and finish the rest on my own time til after i slept. but thank you to everyone who stuck around despite that!

Patreon • RedBubble Store • Commissions • Ko-fi ☆  ᴰᵒ ⁿᵒᵗ ᶜᵒⁿᵗᵃᶜᵗ ᵐᵉ ᵛᶦᵃ ᵗᵘᵐᵇˡʳ ᴵᴹ. ᴰᵒ ⁿᵒᵗ ʳᵉᵈᶦˢᵗʳᶦᵇᵘᵗᵉ ᵐʸ ᵃʳᵗ ʷᶦᵗʰᵒᵘᵗ ᵖᵉʳᵐᶦˢˢᶦᵒⁿ.☆

[jalopeura]

i just think that someone should bend him over and

[chichicl]

Áo dài in FFXIV is so beautiful

My COMMISSION IS OPEN ! Feel free to dm me !

[tokidokifish]

The Man Has Been Clothèd

[palarien]

I haven’t gotten to ShB yet lol but I REALLY wanted to do this screenshot redraw! He’s so... Shiny ✨💖

[eledhrim]

/joy

[livingshad0w]

I’ll come back for you...

Those were the last words that the Warrior of Light had spoken to G’raha Tia, before he had locked himself away to slumber in the Crystal Tower. Not a day passed without at least a passing thought toward the other man, every visit to Mor Dhona punctuated by a pensive moment spent watching the Tower. One day. One day...

...I promise.

[shirokazeyukihime]

Old School Shiro! :o

[metiterasu]

i know u said you might just do all of them but i gotta send sOME 👗👾

ffxiv screenshot meme ♥

👗 - them in a fancy dress

👾 - posing with their favourite minion

[commander-ralyle]

Good bye, monehs

I made like 1 million gil doing maps. I promptly blew it all on looking fancy. X'D

[eorzean-ladies]

And now it’s Bard time!! God I’ve missed my Bard, currently lvl 62, the que time for DPS is crazzzyy long, dang I miss instant pop as Tank </3.