#photos of time passed | gpose

[crystal-verse]

brought to you via NG+, have a vanilla wolgraha gpose feat. pretty Dawntrail graphics

[driftward]

Junelezen 2023: Aftershocks

Last week, I had a masterpost of every single entry I made for Junelezen 2023, which I dubbed Echoes. This week, I am posting annotated entries for every post from there, except this time I am linking to specific entries in the reblog chains, or to posts that others made as responses to Echoes. In particular, one member of my FC, (here on Tumblr as @yzeltia), took it upon himself to create a reblog response to every post.

The previous masterpost can be considered the 'original cut', consisting solely of my entries. This is the 'fat cut' I mentioned there. What parts of all this are canonical? I don't know, come back with a warrant.

As already mentioned, this post will have annotations on the various entries. I could go on for hours about my thought process, things I learned, and I may yet make some other posts about such things, but for now, I am (mostly) restricting myself to commentary here, both on my work, and the work of others.

I have learned a lot during this. One of the things I have learned is that in the future, readmores and reblogs do not necessarily play well together for these round-up posts, as readmores will roll out without the linked reblog, and if you just look at the reblog chain, you'll miss whatever was in the readmore. If I do this again in the future, I think I will stick to making posts, and maybe just link back and forth between them. And maybe if I am responding to someone else's work like this, instead of a reblog, I might just tag OP? I am uncertain. Reblogs keep tumblr alive. The cleanest for archive purposes would probably be reblog the original, then make the follow-up and tag the originator. Still though, that's neither here nor there. What is here is the fantastic work done by others.

And I appreciate all of it. I am humbled by the response.

Final note, these will largely link to Y'zel Tia's responses, since he reblogged almost every response with his own screenshot and words. Click throughs and context should make it obvious which ones are which.

.portrait

Where we got started, with a bit of a literal framing device. Y'zel Tia belongs to @yzeltia; part of his character canon is being a cousin to Y'shtola Rhul, and so that'll explain why you'll often see both of them in his responses. I'm not at all sure why Y'shtola would be interested in what happens to some random feckless adventurer, though...

Special shout out to @matrixdragon and @sabbactroll who both had, uh, opinions on this development. :)

.home

Look, haven't we all had a scientific experiment go a little sideways and light someone's world on fire. This is, of course, the bridge between the Incident and Junelezen: Echoes.

.spring

What strange sights are seen beyond the veil of reality, and what utterly normal places those left behind would go. I picked Coerthas as an early anchor point, since that's where Zoissette grew up.

.new adventure

I was still learning a lot here, both about my tools (gpose+more/Affinity Photo) as well as the posting medium (tumblr). An early goal I had was that the Junelezen 'entry' would be its own screenshot with minimal words, and I would build on the 'story' portion in reblogs or readmores, so that way people who were only interested in the Junelezen part could ignore the rest. This one I used a reblog to expand the story.

Studying Her History (by @yzeltia)

Zoissette would probably prefer they stay out of her room at the Baldesion Annex. Y'shtola is always cute when passed out from studying too much though.

.job

Using a reblog chain to expand the story portion again. I couldn't figure out how to make the jobstone work, so I added a light source to Zoissette's hand to make a kind of 'glow'. Not real happy with how it turned out, but making mistakes makes the learning happen.

Informing Alka Zolka (by @yzeltia)

Okay Y'zel was just trying for emotional damage here. I mean, he succeeded, but still. :|

.mount

I have written about part of Zoissette's mission of mercy before. Look ma, my lore has lore. This event left its mark on her; it did not change her in any great way, just sort of underlines who she already was at that point. In the reblog, Y'zel went for the emotional damage again. Writing in my FC is a PvP activity.

Absence Felt (by @ladyofvoss)

Incredible work here, in the expressiveness of the posture, and the choice of shots taken (at my heart). This is Thalia Voss, belonging to @ladyofvoss. Where she's at is Zoissette's office at Gage Acquisitions (designed by fellow FC member Ghurab)

.friends

Another reblog chain. Compositing the 'shards' to put the faces of friends into them was quite difficult, each one requiring four layers (the way I did it) and quite a bit of manual touch up work. The color scheme was chosen on purpose. Look, Junelezen is also Pride Month, I don't make the rules, but I do make things queer.

1000 words remix (by @yzeltia)

Y'zel has a real fondness for all things music, and that's seen here. As @saesama put it, 'he made an AMV in tumblr form'. Having not played FF X-2, I was not familiar with the song, but I am now. This will not be the last musical piece from our aurally inclined catboy.

.beauty

With this one I really found the problems with reblog chains when making archival posts. This links to the reblog I made to my own post to add story, but in going to the original post, it's actually really hard to fish out the reblog!

We get further hints here that 'Adriané' may not be who Zoissette thinks she is.

Dancing Alone (by @yzeltia)

Dance like nobody's watching. Hey. Why are you watching. Go away, this is meant to be a private moment!

.mirror

Getting to here took a lot of false starts, fiddling with Affinity Photo, getting samples from in game, changing outfits, and it was all worthwhile in the end. I really like the end result. Y'zel went for a more chaotic approach.

Absence Mourned (by @scrollsfromarebornrealm)

For context, the character in these shots is Mathye Bishop, who belongs to @scrollsfromarebornrealm, a character who has been courting Zoissette for over a year by this point. They are close, in any case. The tone provided by the filter and his posture all scream of the devastation he feels in the wake of Zoissette's absence.

.summer

A memory that never happened, but did. Strange things in these echoes, and as has happened before, Y'zel's character visits the 'real' location, feeling a twinge of what is going on out beyond the rift, thanks to his own Echo gift. Klynt Gohtawyn belongs to @saesama, and this hearkens back to the days she and Zoissette may have crossed paths back when they both worked for the Maelstrom.

Klynt's a jerk.

.day

Not much to say for this one. I thought the sun would make more of an arc crossing the sky, making for an interesting dynamic shot, but it turns out it makes kind of a very straight line, which makes sense if you think about it. I had an alternative shot planned that, while it was gorgeous, I just couldn't make the story aspect of it work out. I will probably share that shot, and others, at a future date.

.sun

You can see I am choosing more and more often to use readmores instead of reblogs, and I will probably stand by that decision in the future. Also here is where I found out I had been doing a crime these many years. Due to her somewhat reserved nature, I usually have Zoissette have very subtle almost-nonexistent expressions. Clearly, this entire time, I should have been turning them up somewhere around 11. I love her face.

Echo Disrupted (by @yzeltia)

Looks like in the search for their friend, someone may have overdone it a bit. Overdoing it a bit, in fact, seems to be a bit of a theme with Y'zel, both player and character.

.ancient times

I am not going to take the space it would require for me to say everything that I would like about Atlas, so instead I will just mention that this served as a useful pivot for the story, and provided a path forward. I had actually been juggling several ideas up to this point, and this is where I hard committed to a specific direction. Thanks, Atlas.

Sanctuary remix (by @yzeltia)

Honestly I think Y'zel having his character black out was just an excuse to have a space to put this entry without having to worry about what I was doing. Which, really, is a stroke of genius. Another AMV in tumblr form. Should we make a new word for that?

.night

It was around here that I decided to lean more on my strengths - writing - and less on screenshots. That decision did not last long. Junelezen started as a screenshot event, and I was having fun with those. Here we anchor for everything ever after.

Connected remix (by @yzeltia)

Y'zel introduces me to a new song that lives in my heart.

.romance

Zoissette, no longer losing herself in the echoes, shows up only in the containment suit in shots from here on out. I continue to be cheeky about the colours I use whenever she's in the rift, and Y'zel drops a slick FF8 reference, which just really plays into my love of multiverse shenanigans.

.magic

Not completely sworn off of reblogs yet, though this reblog was pushed out fast, before I had a riot on my hands. This is also where I started hinted more heavily at things to come, with another Lavender PoV piece.

In the reblog chain, where you see the fairies, from left to right, is C'oretta Khell's (belongs to @autumnslance) Lotus, pink-shifted compared to the others; Ryssthota Sundstyrwyn's (belongs to @erickgage) Glitterdust, and Riven Fortemp's (belongs to @scrollsfromarebornrealm) Sugarplum, who I tried to make the little hairtufts rounder for.

.magic response by Y'zel Tia

You can ask Y'zel about this one.

.autumn

And pulled that trigger. This is where I finalized the smoke effect I wanted to use for Lavender, and I'm rather proud of how it turned out, particularly in future shots.

.landscape

I really like this shot, for the utter alien landscape I managed to make using FFXIV assets and some aggressive photo editor work. My only regret is that it does not -quite- look like Zoissette and Lavender are actually in that place, but I think that can be fixed with a few more adjustments.

I'd been leaning on Y'zel's entries to sort of weakly gesture at what may have been going on in the 'real world' while Zoissette was gone, but here I start to make my own narrative about the matter. Judging from conversations I've had, there is one thing I could have made clearer in this story. Zoissette's perspective of how much time has passed is dramatically different from that of the Source. In the Source, it has been a short time. For Zoissette, it has been quite a lot longer.

.travel

I think this is the only one with a single screenshot. I lean more heavily on my writing abilities once more, and I think they speak for themselves.

.dungeon

Figures. Zoissette is having one of the worst days of her life, and the cats are napping. It took me a while to settle on a ghostly effect for the people 'yelling' at her, and I rather like how it turned out. We also are spending more time with Lavender. Hard decisions to be made, but just because they are hard does not mean they are difficult. Lavender and Zoissette are alike like that.

.deity

Some trivia. Zoissette's mom lost her right arm fighting a dragon, back before the Calamity. The Deity is supposed to be a mix of Halone and Zoissette's mother, and so, she, too, is missing her right arm.

.harvest

Reaper job unlocked. Un-edge-lording your edgelord jobs since at least 2016.

.hobbies

So while I was writing a follow-up story for The Incident, I was also trying to follow the Junelezen prompts. And one of my goals was that someone who was just here for Junelezen could just see the photo, nod, go 'ah that makes sense' and move on without having to know a damned thing about the Incident or about Zoissette. I probably did not succeed as well as I would have liked, but I did try.

Having said that, the location of the hobbies prompt in the middle of the others and what I had planned presented some real problems for me, and I did not solve it until pretty late. So we get this moment of downtime. I like how it turned out, but it sure did vex me getting there.

.winter

Back where we began. A lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same. There are a lot of subtle things I did intentionally throughout this story. In this shot, the shift to the skybox and lighting, as well as changing where they are sitting relative to the fence, were decisions I made on purpose.

Speaking of changes done on purpose, Y'zel-the-character's hair goes white as he once again overdoes it. We do recurring themes here, sir.

.cozy

I will stop composing shots of Zoissette and Y'shtola sitting like this the day I die. Also, seriously Y'zel, is NOW the time to be forcing that question??? Ridiculous, now we have -two- casualties.

.relaxing

Under the readmore, we spend more time with the science team, as they try to work out what to do next. But here...

A Relaxing Summary (by @matrixdragon)

I will let @matrixdragon provide the summary.

.fancy clothes

A schematic of the Aurora Laboratories Containment Suit. And two more questions from @matrixdragon, who picked up on my oh-so-subtle (okay no it wasn't) Babylon 5 reference. On that note, I adore the Babylon 5 questions, and I think they serve as an extremely useful framing tool for just about any character in any universe.

Some very touching possible answers from Y'shtola in Y'zel's reblog.

Midnight talk

Things are happening, and faster, now. I did not use a readmore or the reblog chain for these additional entries, which I made sure were scheduled for 2300 in my time zone every night. 1100 for the Junelezen post, 2300 for additional story posts. I keep to this plan for the rest of the run. These special additional entries I refer to as The Eleventh Hour.

.family

Thank you to everyone in these shots. I have a little story in my mind for each one. Maybe I will even write them one day.

The Trapeze Swinger remix (by @yzeltia)

As I go through these entries, I can tell how and where my skills are improving. I can say the same for Y'zel, whose 'tumblr AMV' skills expand. While they are all very good, this is one of his best works, in my opinion, and I found another new song through him.

Recovery plan

Another Eleventh Hour entry. You know, it's funny, this arguably all started because Zoissette was trying very hard to not be a burden on her FC or an inconvenience to anyone.

Sure seem to have inconvenienced a lot of people here.

The Last Contingency: Judgement Call (by @saesama)

This one stabs right in the feeling-parts, but somebody has to think of these things, and Zoissette isn't here to do it.

.holidays

Erick Gage (@erickgage) has something to say about this whole mess.

The Only Exception remix (by @yzeltia)

You may have invented the AMV. But Y'zel tumblrized it. Perfected its new form. And then he unleashed it upon us all.

Reconciliation

And truth, at last. I could say so much here. I elect to say nothing.

.free

The final shot was a pain to composite, and I am so proud of how it turned out.

.begin

One year, from Zoissette's perspective, give or take a lot. Two weeks for the world. But she's home again.

Ma there's a cat on the foot of my bed I don't know how it got there (but seriously, thank you @yzeltia :) )

BONUS SECTION

Imposter Syndrome! (by @starladyquasar)

Ladies, ladies, you're both beautiful. Though also seriously, Squeenix, give us more customisation options.

ELEZEVANGELION (by @yzeltia)

You want to know what it's like being part of the funniest FC? It's pretty great, I tell you what.

Anyroad. Special thanks to all of you - those who stopped to leave a comment, or found me on the moon during a screenshot session (you know who you are), or even those of you who just followed along, in whole or in part. And for those of you who were just here for Elezen shots, I hope you found something you liked in here!

[wilanserulia]

Just for fun, I figured it'd be interesting to post a "before and after" comparison, with the raw picture straight from the game on the left (before shaders) and my final edit on the right. I don't always do this, god I don't have enough time in the day to do this for every photo I take and in retrospect I could have probably spent my afternoon in better ways yesterday, but I think some shots really deserve the extra effort. So if that sounds interesting to you let me show you a breakdown of what goes into a shot like this!

When I decide bring a picture on the editing table, usually first and foremost I take a photo of the environment by itself, and a chromakey photo of just the characters of the foreground (I eventually cut out the rest of the floor by hand). These will come in handy for adjusting the elements of the picture independently later.

What I'll probably touch up on first is smoothing out polygons. Shoulders, knees and other joints tend to create unnatural sharp angles when bent too much, and muscles like the thigh here can't accurately simulate the way human muscles flex. Not to mention the body horror going on with that thumb.

While I'm at it, I painted over some parts of the model where the lighting got confused, and made it look a little more believable, like on the fingers of Wilan's hand here.

The biggest reason I did a photoshop pass however is the skirt. Everyone who has ever tried to pose with skirts, robes or capes knows that FFXIV isn't really built for handling cloth, and there's a lot of negotiating involved to make it look decent. I sent more time than I care to admit trying to get the best approximation possible, smoothed it out with Liquify and then painted over folds that didn't quite look believable and details that clipped in awkward places.

While I was painting over polygons, there were a handful of places where I couldn't avoid some clipping, and certain spots were more noticeable than others. For all the spots where the 3D models really wouldn't behave I resorted to just fix it manually.

Once that's done, I went over the lighting. Gpose's three posable lights did most of the work, but I still went in to take care of some details. In most places I just painted over additional highlights on shiny material, or I added subtle touches of rim lighting to make the pose more readable.

And then, for something less subtle, I sometimes just add more rim light for no other reason than to make the pose more dramatic or to further make it pop from the background. This is a photo with a strong pose and sense of motion, so it's worth taking the time to highlight it.

(speaking of which, the base pose I used for this shot was done by Nhagiri, even though as I almost always do when I use pre-made poses I spent plenty of time adjusting it and calibrating it to my two specific OCs)

This shot had pretty intense and dramatic back-light too, so since FFXIV's graphic engine usually calls it a day early when it comes to draw ground shadows I've just painted it myself.

And most importantly, the lighting was very carefully set but I couldn't manage to properly light up their faces without messing with the overall light and shadow contrast. So I carefully mixed in a different photo with better lighting on their faces, and then calibrated the luminosity and exposure to make sure they'd be the the centerpoint of the shot.

Well that's about it for the models, now off to the color correction.

Most of it was done in photoshop but a lot of the heavy lifting was made by shaders. My go-to presets are @owlincense's CandleBlooms (formerly known as Purple Cocoon), which I've used in pretty much every single one of my photos and can't recommend enough. For this shot in particular I've used her Tourmaline Colorful preset.

It looks great already, but I have some further touches in mind for the specific mood I'm looking for for this scene and I don't want to mess to mess with the shaders' interface to achieve them, so post-editing it is.

First of all I've adjusted the tonality of the background to be colder and more bluish and a tiny bit less saturated, while accentuating the reds of the two characters, bumping up slightly their saturation and contrast. I've also manually simulated bright light coming from the main hall in what's hopefully a convincingly seamless fashion, reinforcing the light source and making the strong highlights and shadows feel more justified, and a vignette to darken the far edges of the composition.

Just a little dash of particles caught in the light as the last touch, and that's about it! Wilan and Delen can enjoy their passionate tango, in a little quite corner to themselves, just outside the bustle of the celebration in the main hall.

[crystal-verse]

I won't have time to do anything tomorrow, so here's an early valentine's gpose instead. Local god lays in bed using his beloved Exarch's lap as a pillow.

(gpose brought to you via @wind-up-nhaama 's The Pendants Suite in the lavender beds)

[crystal-verse]

Not included in my previous post: them

[crystal-verse]

I got a new laptop and haven't been able to put more RAM in it yet, so have these screenshots brought to you by a few new reshade presets!

[crystal-verse]

Today I give you more of them. Tomorrow? Who knows

[crystal-verse]

misc. drk screenshots feat. k'pheli, "fray", sidurgu, and rielle

[crystal-verse]

I got a big pack of reshade settings from the person who made the one i've been using for a while (hellsingress' Hell's Presets Complete Collection) so i of course took many different versions of a single gpose. it was very fun, at least!

[crystal-verse]

misc. screenshots feat. @snow-system-wol 's S'ria, @fell-court 's Lorenza, and @ex-garlean 's Omen

[crystal-verse]

after several months i've finally gotten terpander lux. . . this was my first relic weapon and i am so very very happy to finally have it

[crystal-verse]

YOU. GIVE ME A GUN

[crystal-verse]

misc. HW screenshots from yesterday and today's session of playing through MSQ! more under the cut bc there's a good bit here oops

[crystal-verse]

gameplay progress: i beat the vault :'')

[crystal-verse]

The gang!! Feat. @snow-system-wol 's S'ria, @fell-court 's Lorenza, @soothingmind 's Nimda Scala, @sidera-lla 's Sidera Lla, and my K'pheli Tia!

[crystal-verse]

ran odin unsynched with some friends, and then ran CoB with those same friends so one of them could get the lore n such. it was very fun. have some screenshots from those (feat. the final coil of bahamut turn 4, which we had to do a second time because our two level 90 friends had killed bahamut too quick for the phase changes lol)

pictured in the fifth picture, left-to-right, is @soothingmind 's Nimda, @snow-system-wol 's S'ria, my K'pheli, and @fell-court 's Lorenza. Just a bunch of Miqo'te (or, three Miqo'te and a voidsent) vibing on a rock, nothing odd here