@runekept's FFXIV sideblog since I needed somewhere to OCpost in peace.
about
world's okayest caster main, novice gposer, elf yaoi enthusiast, and blond man objectifier. 18+ only please!
MSQ progress: patch 7.0 (Dawntrail)
ravel valkian – a gridanian orphan here for a good time, not a long time, until becoming the warrior of light suddenly shifted his five-year plan from "die a hero and look cool doing it" to "survive through sheer spite"
florentel de durendaire – house durendaire's least important and second least useful member, a budding astrologian whose academic interests ranged from questionable to heretical before his "mysterious" departure from ishgard
caraway fareswell – a former sharlayan archaeology student whose academic career was disrupted by debilitating visions of a past life, now devoted to answering to the questions his predecessor never could
anything u think about YOUR life after 10pm is bs to be ignored. anything u think about a character’s life after 10pm should be posted about online and expanded on for paragraphs. :)
i think everyone who is worried about their skill doing content in ff14 should watch an ultimate world race. if you have ever felt like shit for not immediately understanding a mechanic you've never seen before, you will be Spiritually Healed watching the absolute best players in the world spend multiple hours and 20 pulls just to make it 25 milliseconds further into a fight. you will watch people just completely fuck mechanics that they have successfully done 30 pulls in a row for no other reason than they're tired and their brain shidded. no matter what your skill ceiling is, the trajectory of gaining competence follows pretty much the same arc. be soothed
It's been another whole year of playing critically acclaimed mmo final fantasy xiv which means Arsay is one year older today!! Happy birthday to my most special of blue kitties 💙😸
and as a reminder this Saturday I'm hosting a little online get together to celebrate with all the wonderful friends I've met here!
need to clear out my inbox so bad but I suddenly have everything going on in june..... if you have tagged me in anything and I haven't gotten to it 1) I am so sorry 2) I love you
#honestly when I was in an FC that raided savage#most often what we called them was “get in get in get in” and “out out out out” @ecosystem-administrator
trans women and trans men and nonbinary people and everyone else being friends and holding each other close and falling in love and thinking of each other. I'm making this my future. let's all be okay together
climbing back up on my soapbox while im thinking about it but to me all the ancients kinda have something queer going on with their genders. since their society was all about being the same outwardly. im sure inwards they were doing all sorts of shit and nobody gaf so long as they yknow. kept it to themselves and those closest to them
A few people have shown interest in replicating the pride backlighting I did, so hey, here’s a quick tutorial below the cut.
Enjoy, and happy Pride Month. 🏳️🌈
STEP 1 — SETUP
First thing you’ll want to do is find a suitably dark background to bounce the light off of. I use the White Screen housing item dyed Soot Black, available from the Housing Merchant or Apartment Merchant in any of the housing zones for 3000 gil.
I line up 2-3 of them for coverage, but one will do if you're trying to be frugal.
If you don’t have an apartment or an FC room to use, try asking friends, FC mates, or even folks you share a Discord server with. You might even find someone who already has a studio space set up and is willing to let you use it!
Lighting in your studio space should be 0 (though you might have success at 1 as well), so make sure to adjust that or ask the studio owner if they can make that change before you start posing.
STEP 2 — GPOSE
Position your character(s) just a little ways back from the edge of the screen. You want some space between them and the screen so that the lighting can float there without casting a weird circle on the wall.
Hop into /gpose and bump up the “Manual brightness adjustment” to about 120 or whatever level allows you to see your character well enough to pose them. Pose to your heart's content.
STEP 3 — LIGHTS
Here’s the fun part. In the Light tab of the Gpose menu, switch all of your Light sources to Type 1, which has the shortest falloff radius (meaning it doesn't reach as far as Type 2 or 3). I also set all of my lights to one strong color to differentiate them while I worked on lighting—red, green, and blue, all maxed out at 255 (for now).
Swing your camera (still on all default settings) around to your character’s back and up above their head a little ways. This is where Light 1 (red) will go.
Now pan your camera down at about mid-back height and set Light 2 (green) there.
Pan your camera down one last time until you have a nice shot of your character’s butt and set Light 3 (blue).
If you have "circles" that appear on the background behind your character, your lights are little too close to the backdrop. Pull your camera in towards your character just a bit more to reposition your lights. I recommend doing this at a Camera Position setting of 100 so that your sense of "close" and "far" aren't skewed by extreme Field of View (FOV). You can adjust that once you're happy with light positions.
Spin your camera back around and enjoy this nice little macaw-colored gradient.
STEP 4 — CAMERA
Set your camera angle.
The way FFIXV’s lighting works is partially dependent on how much light is in a shot. It will adjust a lot like your eyes do when you’re entering a dark room from a bright room, or vice versa. Your zoom level and camera angle are going to directly affect the lighting, so set this before you start messing with light strength and color. Sometimes this means weaker lighting will actually light your character better.
I ended up bringing my lights down to around ~160 and boosted the "Manual brightness adjustment" up quite a bit to get lighting I was happier with.
For a straightforward vertical shot, I like to have my Camera Position/FOV at 200 and of course my rotation is set to 90. Zoom in or out as needed. Remember to save your camera angle if you plan to pan around and fix things!
STEP 5 — COLOR
Make it ~queer~.
Take your flag of choice and pick out 2-3 “main” hues. Generally these will be the strongest hues in the flag, if not the only ones. Some flags, like the Pride/Progress/Intersex-Inclusive flag itself, are difficult to replicate for the sheer number of colors that are in it. You can loosely represent a rainbow with some adjustment to the RGB colors, if you’re determined to have a whole rainbow in there.
Shader Note: I recommend picking a shader preset that doesn’t mess too much with color so that colors are represented correctly. You may need to adjust light strength and “Manual brightness adjustment” to be compatible with your preset of choice. Bloom will also heavily affect the way your colors are showing up, so you may need to tone down the bloom FX or toggle it off entirely. This all depends on your preset, however.
If you’re not into RGB math, here are some cheat sheets! Not every flag is represented here of course, but I tried to cover as many colors as I could so that you could grab a color from another flag as needed! Please note that colors will need some adjustment for your own screenshot, presets, and preferences.
And that’s it, y’all! 🏳️🌈
(Open this image up in a new tab for more detail.)
These were taken using a heavily customized shader for that nice glowy effect.
