Spaghetti hair in the graphic update

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Originally Posted by Araxes

Massive graphical improvements will not be possible in this MMORPG as long as it has to run on the old XBOX and the PS4 and i assume they will ditch both of the last gen consoles next Expansion. Not that it helps all that much since they already have to forcibly enable LOD for Xbox Series S

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PS4 is capable of good looking hair, the issue is going to stem from the simple fact the engine this game runs on isn't equipped to do anything fancy that makes hair look good.
FF16 and FFXIV are not on the same engine, I don't think the XIV engine is even used anymore.

FF7R used Unreal and FFXVI is on a different proprietary engine.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

PS4 is capable of good looking hair, the issue is going to stem from the simple fact the engine this game runs on isn't equipped to do anything fancy that makes hair look good.
FF16 and FFXIV are not on the same engine, I don't think the XIV engine is even used anymore.

FF7R used Unreal and FFXVI is on a different proprietary engine.

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Incorrect. XVI's using XIV's engine, obviously expanded
Source: https://www.gamesradar.com/final-fan...ive%20surprise

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Originally Posted by Acelyn

People really cant wrap their heads around the fact that this games roots are based on the ps3...

dude posted a photo from the newest FF running on ps5.

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Uh-uh, and the graphic update is also based on the ps3 I presume?

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Originally Posted by Araxes

Massive graphical improvements will not be possible in this MMORPG as long as it has to run on the old XBOX and the PS4 and i assume they will ditch both of the last gen consoles next Expansion. Not that it helps all that much since they already have to forcibly enable LOD for Xbox Series S

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This also has nothing to do with the thread at hand, the new graphic update is introducing PBR processes and it works on xbox and ps4 even if not with all options. They can remake and update the faces, skin, shaders, there is literally no reason they cannot do the same for hair as well.

If people actually read what I wrote, it's not a problem of platform, it's a problem of bad art combined with a lack of new updated shaders on hair.

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Originally Posted by Taliriah

ff16 is a single player game, so they have complete control over how many characters are displayed, therefore they can allocate them a higher budget (for memory, GPU usage, cpu usage possibly as well if there's jiggle physics on the hair strands). And it also mean that there's only one player character and a bunch of NPCs, so they can easily give a higher budget for the player character.

In ff14 they instead have to restrict the per character budget to make sure things will still fit in a typical "worst case scenario" (like limsa at peak hours). Plus they are also constrained by the crappier platforms (consoles) which have more limited resources.

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I'm aware and I usually say this as well. But arguably they can at least use more polygons on the hair than they did with the original hair styles released in ARR and that's my point.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Speaking as someone that has worked for a while in the 3D art department in the industry, this is hardly a mesh/3D problem. This is a problem of texture scaling first and foremost. The hair strands are displayed as if they were looked at through a magnifying lens right now, like x10 or something. The start for a fix to this is to take those strands and scale them out by ten or something more fitting.

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I guess they could do that and just make the gaps between the strands invisible so it looks like there's gaps when there's not. The polygon thing just became really obvious due to the issues in the benchmark combined with trying out ARR hairstyles.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

FFXVI is on a different proprietary engine.

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...which is based on the FF14 engine. There are a number of things in FF16 that make you know it's the same engine too.

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Originally Posted by Acelyn

People really cant wrap their heads around the fact that this games roots are based on the ps3...

dude posted a photo from the newest FF running on ps5.

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Scaling the size of a texture on a 3D mesh has nothing to do with hardware limitations. You literally just paint thinner hair strands, or a better texture overall. The texture can be the same resolution. Or even just have the UV map size that's assigned to the hair increased a small bit so that the existing texture looks more zoomed out. If you don't do it by much you won't get any tiling or repeating of the texture and it can still look good.

Hair may very well be the last in a long line of improvements yet to be worked on over the next few years.

It doesn't really matter if the hair looks perfect if it is still clipped when wearing armor with hoods or high collars.

Hair clipping is a much, much less trivial problem to address. It requires the introduction of solid mesh collision systems. I'm not saying it's not possible though, you'd have to see that with their programmers, but it would be introducing a brand new system all the same, and probably adapt all the hairstyles and gear with very basic physical 3D meshes (envelopes, similar to the invisible ones you already have behind the 3D environment, furniture, etc) acting as blockers used by such a system.

What I'm discussing here however, requires literally nothing but some work on the art department side because all the tech is already here for it.

The reason the scaling was so big before is more likely because of the low res of the textures that blurred everything, and in order to see any macro detail come out of that soup you actually wanted to have extremely broad spaghetti strokes. Right now though, it feels obsolete and counterproductive with higher res textures. And to be honest, even without talking about the diffuse map scaling, there is still the fact that hair doesn't seem to have been reworked to include the new shaders brought by the update, sadly, the texture just got a higher res.

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Originally Posted by Araxes

Massive graphical improvements will not be possible in this MMORPG as long as it has to run on the old XBOX and the PS4 and i assume they will ditch both of the last gen consoles next Expansion. Not that it helps all that much since they already have to forcibly enable LOD for Xbox Series S

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Read the post above yours. Besides, even if factoring that out (and correct me if I'm wrong) aren't the minimal OS requirements to run the game even weaker than Xbox and PS4? I'm not a tech guru, but I'm pretty sure consoles are not the constraint. It actually has much more to do with what consumers can afford than anything. It's just something that has to be accepted for any game that is multi-platform.

Hair is spaghett, add marinara sauce and garlic bread.

This is what happens when you create an MMO where the premier end game content is afking in Limsa zoomed in on your character's face.