Housing graphics update

This is a slightly altered copy of a post I made on the Lodestone blog regarding new lighting in houses after the graphics update. Since I saw a couple of people posting here regarding that issue I decided to share my findings in case someone finds it useful.

Overall, it seems that the new lighting model creates very harsh and dark shadows, together with lots of blown-out highlights. This results in an image that looks like it has way too much contrast, especially when comparing it to pre-update images. Depending on your house design this can drastically alter the feeling of your house or apartment, to the point where the main theme or idea of your design now might be completely unrecognizable.

In the old screenshots you can see that while the graphics may not have a very realistic look to it, the image itself is well-balanced, there are no overexposed or underexposed areas, and the image itself is easy to read and understand. Screenshots after the update display much harsher shadows, it almost looks like the interior is being lit by an artificial sun, directly inside of the house. Usually in the real world, the interior light appears much more diffused because of light fixtures having glass with diffusion properties, and also light bouncing off multiple planes and surfaces of the interior, creating less harsh shadows.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...5-h768-s-no-gm

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...5-h768-s-no-gm

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...5-h768-s-no-gm

After messing around with graphics settings It seems that the main culprits of this look are the new Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (further AO) settings. The better the quality of AO, the harsher shadows you get in the final image. For comparison, I provided the difference between the two highest AO settings, even between these two the difference is massive. Using older AO settings results in visuals that are much more similar to how the game looked before the update.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...5-h768-s-no-gm

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...5-h768-s-no-gm

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...5-h768-s-no-gm


https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...5-h768-s-no-gm

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...5-h768-s-no-gm

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...5-h768-s-no-gm

Also, the highest quality AO seems to be very inaccurate, and it provides some weird visuals with objects in front of other surfaces. For example here, you can see that AO crops out around my PC, NPC and the column on the left, leaving a weird-looking aura effect:

https://i.ibb.co/CmPHH1Y/Stair-comparison2r.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/PNNdRCm/Stair-comparison1r.jpg

As well as in this example of AO being rendered around the wall partition bars:

https://i.ibb.co/60qsTBV/Bar-comparison2r.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/rd4tQYL/Bar-comparison1r.jpg

I was neutral about the other graphics updates when I first logged in yesterday. Then I entered my house... The lighting changes in player houses looks absolutely terrible, to the point that I no longer enjoy even being in the house I spent a year designing.

It's the harsh shadows and textures you mentioned, eapecially on textured partitons and wallpapers... but worse. There is an overall hazy look to everything. The best way I can describe it is that it looks like a vacuum bag exploded in the room and everything is covered in dust. This is especially bad in my bright (lighting 5) medium, where half my walls and furnishings are dyed pure white.

I play on PS5 and adjusted every setting I could but nothing helped. The closest I could get to getting rid of the haze was upping the gamma setting, which I have never had to adjust before. Increasing to max helps a little in the house but it's way too bright everywhere else, and certainly does not look good in the other rooms I've done with dark lighting. I also tried adjusting PS5 screen output settings such as RGB amd HDR but nothing made a difference to this.

There are additional color problems between objects. For example, I have a white partiton next to an open partition, both pure white. The open partition is several shades darker than the white partition now.

Pure white leather sofas look dirty grey now, with a nasty pixelated texture along the bottom border of the couch.

The mog station gold walls now look like yellow rust instead of smooth, shiny gold. They look absolutely nothing like they do on the mog station image.

The bottom line for me at the moment is that all 8 of the various rooms I've done look so ugly to me now that I never want to enter them again. Player housing used to be the most enjoyable part of the game to me and for the last day I've just been trying to ignore it completely. I was hoping it was a PS5 issue that I could change or a pending update to older zones or something I just had to wait for, but it seems over the last few days there are several posts about this.

Overall the interior lighting got incredibly bright, even with Lighting Level 0.
This doesn't seem to be intentional.

Here are some shots of my house before and after.

Before (Endwalker):
https://i.ibb.co/gDmPjdq/ffxiv-dx11-...9-16-40-01.png
After (Dawntrail 7.0):
https://i.ibb.co/cJ5fCzw/2024-06-29-...s-Gameplay.png


Before (Endwalker):
https://i.ibb.co/ZMwmVsc/ffxiv-dx11-...9-16-41-16.png
After (Dawntrail 7.0):
https://i.ibb.co/nBM8CVh/2024-06-29-...s-Gameplay.png


Before (Endwalker):
https://i.ibb.co/x2FBRb6/ffxiv-dx11-...9-16-42-48.png
After (Dawntrail 7.0):
https://i.ibb.co/kQWRcsS/2024-06-29-...s-Gameplay.png

All shots are made with Lighting Level 0 inside a Lavender Beds Mansion. The original dark look does not work anymore. Graphics settings are Maximum, HBAO+ Quality. I tinkered around with the settings and wasn't able to change the lighting at all.
I also noticed a similiar issue with our FC house in Empyreum. The intended lighting level was 2, i reduced it to 0 and it's still too bright in some areas.

Keep in mind the lighting was overhauled after the community complained the shadows were too soft. This is probably an unfortunate side effect of that.

I definitely agree that the GTAO Quality setting looks very harsh. It is supposedly more accurate than HBAO+ but I've found that it often doesn't make sense in the way it's shading things, as you've shown as well. Quite strange.

Agreed.

The new lighting is way too bright.

I mentioned in another couple of posts, but at lighting setting 0, a house/apartment should be almost pitch black (if no light sources have been added). Now it's this semi-bright washed out look.

Has quite ruined the fun of making creative lighting and decorating decisions. Like others, has made me not want to work on housing at the moment, which is a bummer as people spend a lot of time and gil on their housing builds.

Hopefully it's just a technical oversight and they can fix.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Merton9999

I was neutral about the other graphics updates when I first logged in yesterday. Then I entered my house... The lighting changes in player houses looks absolutely terrible, to the point that I no longer enjoy even being in the house I spent a year designing.

It's the harsh shadows and textures you mentioned, eapecially on textured partitons and wallpapers... but worse. There is an overall hazy look to everything. The best way I can describe it is that it looks like a vacuum bag exploded in the room and everything is covered in dust. This is especially bad in my bright (lighting 5) medium, where half my walls and furnishings are dyed pure white.

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Yeah, I know what you mean. I had that same feeling when I visited my house for the first time after the update went live :D

I think that after the patch many furniture items are missing certain material qualities that they used to have. Especially metal-like qualities, which might lead to everything feeling like it is covered with dust, as you described. For example, originally the Gaol Partitions, which are supposed to be made out of metal, used to be very shiny, you could even see highlights around individual rivets in the texture. However now it looks more like a painted-over wood surface, it's just not as shiny as before and contains barely any highlights. Similarly, a lot of other furniture items look very washed out as well, with metal parts not providing any highlights.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...7-h452-s-no-gm

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...7-h452-s-no-gm


https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...7-h452-s-no-gm

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...7-h452-s-no-gm

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tako-Takemi

All shots are made with Lighting Level 0 inside a Lavender Beds Mansion. The original dark look does not work anymore. Graphics settings are Maximum, HBAO+ Quality. I tinkered around with the settings and wasn't able to change the lighting at all.
I also noticed a similiar issue with our FC house in Empyreum. The intended lighting level was 2, i reduced it to 0 and it's still too bright in some areas.

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That is definitely an interesting change, it almost looks like the game now thinks there is much more additional light coming into the interior of the house from somewhere.

At first, I thought that maybe this is because the default windows in the exterior walls now let in more daylight, but I can see in your last screenshot that the updated images were taken during night time.

I saw some comparison screenshots of characters in cutscenes being more brightly lit now as if they are receiving secondary indirect light that is bouncing off from the ground or other surfaces. I wonder if it could be a similar effect that is happening inside of the interior spaces as well. Here is the link, WARNING, the link contains images from cutscenes with SHADWOBRINGERS SPOILERS: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ne_old_vs_new/

Quote:

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Originally Posted by StrangeSkirt

Yeah, I know what you mean. I had that same feeling when I visited my house for the first time after the update went live :D

I think that after the patch many furniture items are missing certain material qualities that they used to have. Especially metal-like qualities, which might lead to everything feeling like it is covered with dust, as you described.

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You're exactly right. The metal floor looks like cardboard now. Same with white marble. The overall lighting haze is the biggest issue, but the individual furnishing textures are wrong too. Most items in my rooms have become flat, dusty and/or pixelated.

Or colors have been completely changed. It is no longer possible for me to find any color that looks the same on a white partition as it does on an open partition, so combining them in the same room would be impossible.

I've been reading that the graphic update hasn't been applied to most old gear at this time and was wondering if the same applies to housing furnishings?

I'm really hoping that this is unintentional. I can't stomach housing at the moment due to the lighting and texture problems. The rest of the game looks beautiful to me with the update. The worst part is that I've probably spent around $300 on cash shop items (mostly white dye and gold walls) and none of them work as intended now. I never would have considered buying them if I knew they would end up looking like they do now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

I definitely agree that the GTAO Quality setting looks very harsh. It is supposedly more accurate than HBAO+ but I've found that it often doesn't make sense in the way it's shading things, as you've shown as well. Quite strange.

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Yeah, also I'm pretty sure that the only difference between GTAO Standard and Quality options is just the overall size of the "shadowy" filter that gets applied to the final image. It doesn't seem that there is any kind of different calculation being performed, which is kind of implied by the option name "Quality".

Im not really versed in lighting like some of you guys here but here's a video of my house before and after lighting changes.

Before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS5A...ature=youtu.be

After: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwgZ...nnel=RollRyuko

It pretty much rid of all the little shadowy corners and really removed a lot of the ambience.

Yoshi-P has responded: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...e4e7501facc4d6

Since patch 7.05 brought us adjustments to housing lighting and shadows, I decided to post some additional comparisons between pre-7.0; 7.0, and 7.05 visuals.

Overall it seems that after the update the quality of visuals is much more similar to those of the original pre-7.0 patch. At least on Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (further AO) GTAO Standard setting. I’m still unsure of how I feel about the GTAO Quality setting, it's very rough, dark and has occlusion culling issues. It works well in new areas where object complexity is much more advanced, but in the old maps, to me, it still feels like too much and creates weird ghosting effects around objects.

Metal objects still seem to be missing their original shininess, highlights, and reflective qualities. This makes me wonder whether those assets just haven’t been appropriately updated yet, or whether this is their intended new look.

This is a link to my lodestone blog post, where it might be easier to compare the screenshots with the gallery view.


COMPARISON NUMBER ONE

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2


GTAO: STANDARD comparison:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2


GTAO: QUALITY comparison:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2

COMPARISON NUMBER TWO

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2


GTAO: STANDARD comparison:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2


GTAO: QUALITY comparison:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw...-gm?authuser=2

Quote:

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Originally Posted by StrangeSkirt

Metal objects still seem to be missing their original shininess, highlights, and reflective qualities. This makes me wonder whether those assets just haven’t been appropriately updated yet, or whether this is their intended new look.

---

To me, the bottom in each grouping of screenshots looks better. And overall, their fix greatly improved my dimly lit home, and colors are back to normal on furnishings.

I seem to remember them saying that the PCs and the environments were getting the updates first, and they’d go back and retouch everything else as they could get to it. Looking at some pieces of furniture, I definitely don’t think they got any updated textures.

The new update (30/31 July) is horrible. The light / mirror reflections are gone. Sure, it's now dark and bright again but in a complete shitty way. What a downgrade. >.<

My character also looks bad in all the apartments and houses I checked. The lighting and reflections are just off. It's so miserable that I don't even want to bother with housing until it's fixed.

Water reflections also don't look good anymore. (Inside houses.)
And the light cast from windows also is bad now.
I'm just going to log out of FF14 for now.
Don't feel like playing with how bad the living looks now. It's just too frustrating.

Thank you for posting this update with detailed pictures. I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately my rooms still look too unpleasant to enjoy updating, or even being in since the 7.05 fixes.

I do think the overall lighting levels are better. Thankfully my rooms no longer have the dusty haze that made them look like the fog weather effect had been turned on inside houses in 7.0. Overall brightness seems to have been fixed.

Unfortunately, that was not the extent of the problems:

There are still ugly, jagged, blocky. shadows cast by objects. The shadows are so comically severe in houses that the bottom of stage panels in brightly lit rooms (level 5) look extremely dirty, like someone forgot to clean the baseboards in their home for years.

Open partitions and half partitions are still several shades darker with all color choices compared to the "white partition" furnishing with the same dye applied. This makes any room that combines both look ridiculous.

Marble and iron plate floors still look like cardboard. As the OP stated, it appears their material effects have been removed so they all look flat, like paper now. The iron plate floor in my apartment used to show subtle reflections of other objects but have no reflective quality at all now.

I don't know if furnishing textures themselves have been updated but some change is making them look bad. The bottom of leather sofas look pixelated. Cash shop gold walls look like yellow rust still, instead of being smooth and shiny. They look nothing like the advertized cash shop image.

I'm not as repulsed as I was before 7.05 but so many things still look so obviously wrong that being in my rooms is upsetting rather than enjoyable. Currently as it stands, player housing isn't a system I can participate in to create anything I would be proud of.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Merton9999

-rooms still look too unpleasant
-material effects have been removed so they all look flat
-no reflective quality

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The worst thing is the lighting (4K/PS5).
If you stand next to a window in daylight, your character will turn completely white and all texture details will be erased.
And there is now not a single wall or floor lamp that provides enough light. Basically, you need to place the lamp directly in front of your face to get some glow.
Of course, you can increase the character's self-illumination and gamma, but then you'll look like a white ghost whenever you leave the house.
HDR settings have also been missing since 7.0.
7.0 housing wasn't perfect, but it was a lot better than what we have now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clerith

The worst thing is the lighting (4K/PS5).
If you stand next to a window in daylight, your character will turn completely white and all texture details will be erased.
And there is now not a single wall or floor lamp that provides enough light. Basically, you need to place the lamp directly in front of your face to get some glow.
Of course, you can increase the character's self-illumination and gamma, but then you'll look like a white ghost whenever you leave the house.
HDR settings have also been missing since 7.0.
7.0 housing wasn't perfect, but it was a lot better than what we have now.

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Yes, it really is a bad lighting issue. The OP referred to this and it is mentioned all over the forum thread on eye strain. The old zones have really suffered from the lighting changes.

It looks to me like what may happen if someone criticized the shadows and contrast on my work, I got offended and, in spite, applied a high contrast filter to it 10 times.

I zone into Thavnair or Limsa and feel attacked by jet black ink splattered in some places and glaring, focused bloom in others. In houses, custom light sources produce hyper focused splotches now instead of natural looking illumination. And items that should be affected by light (metal)... just aren't anymore.

I can just ignore this in the open world as something I just don't enjoy looking at anymore. Oh well, I'm traveling around an ugly world now. In my house, it's a very different feeling. I designed it, spent months of time tuning it, hundreds of millions of gil and hundreds of real dollars. Then someone vandalized it.