dye request - spriggan black

[tdb]

Since we're getting all sciency here, I'd like to point out that even if you simulate true blackness within the game's graphics engine, what reaches your eyes is still not true black because your monitor is incapable of producing that. LCD panels have a fairly substantial amount of light bleeding through "black" pixels. OLED is better and can actually turn its pixels off completely, but there's still reflections from the environment.

What actually matters here is how the color is perceived. And the human senses can be fooled in many ways. For instance the screen in my home theater is actually closer to white when observed in normal lighting. But when I turn off the lights and start a movie, I perceive black parts of the image as black because they're so much darker than the bright parts. I can see that the velvet lining around the screen is an even darker black, but that doesn't prevent me from perceiving parts of the image as black.

The consequence of this however is that is absorbs so much heat you have to be very careful what you apply it to. For example if you painted the bottom of a pool with it, it would boil and vaporise the water within minutes, and release toxic chorine gas. And the patent for it is owned by a very petty and spiteful man.

That seems unlikely. Even a small pool has at least a few cubic metres of water, perhaps around 10. Water's heat capacity is about 4.2 kJ/kg°C; furthermore, boiling water requires another 2.26 MJ/kg. To heat up our 10 m³ pool from 20 °C to 100 °C and boil it away would take 26 GJ of energy. Such a pool might have a submerged surface area of 10-20 m² depending on how deep it is. Direct sunlight at sea level provides energy at a rate of about 1050 W/m², so if all of that energy is absorbed into the pool it's heated with a power of about 20 kW. At that power it would take just over two weeks to completely boil away the pool. And that's assuming the sun was directly overhead on a cloudless sky 24 hours a day, and also ignoring any heat transferred from the pool to the surrounding ground or air.

A small kids' pool with 200 liters of water would take almost a week to completely boil, because as you reduce the amount of water the surface area inevitably is reduced too (unless you're willing to call a 1 cm layer of water a "pool"). Even a small glass of water would take over an hour.

Furthermore, a typical black paint absorbs around 90% of all incoming light, so Vantablack causes only about 10% more heat.

[Morningstar1337]

Off the top of my head:

- magenta used for some caster gear like the sky pirate and Shisui sets

- pinks

- soft orange as on the Pagos shirt

I'll have to look into these, thanks. If they pan out then I might have more options for color-coding the 6.0 jobs.

[TheMightyMollusk]

As a side topic, you should look up 'Vanta Black'. There is a real life black dye that is virtually free of reflection.
The consequence of this however is that is absorbs so much heat you have to be very careful what you apply it to. For example if you painted the bottom of a pool with it, it would boil and vaporise the water within minutes, and release toxic chorine gas. And the patent for it is owned by a very petty and spiteful man.

That old meme? The one posted by a tumblr account literally named facts-i-just-made-up?

[yotsuffy]

Well, well,

I'm not part of FFXIV's devs team so I can't say anything about how they made spriggans and the Spriggan Cap lightless. Maybe they applied a #000000 black, maybe they didn't apply any texture and the game shows the nothing it has to show.

All I know is we don't see any shadow darker than them on them and they look black unlike anything else. It is this effect I wish for and tried to recreate on my color test.

Spriggan black

[Gemina]

I've never found an exact match for the blue dragoon AF1 set.

I use Peacock blue. It's not an exact match, but a lot does depend on what you are actually dying. Currently on my DRG I am using the AF1 head, legs and hands. The body and feet are the dyable replica Allagan maiming gear for the body, and replica dreadwyrm maiming for feet, and dying those two Peacock blue blends the colors very nicely in a less spikey version of the DRG armor.

That is a very particular shade of blue. Really close to a true a sapphire, and I was surprised I was able to find anything closee.

[Gemina]

Since we're getting all sciency here, I'd like to point out that even if you simulate true blackness within the game's graphics engine, what reaches your eyes is still not true black because your monitor is incapable of producing that. LCD panels have a fairly substantial amount of light bleeding through "black" pixels. OLED is better and can actually turn its pixels off completely, but there's still reflections from the environment.

What actually matters here is how the color is perceived. And the human senses can be fooled in many ways. For instance the screen in my home theater is actually closer to white when observed in normal lighting. But when I turn off the lights and start a movie, I perceive black parts of the image as black because they're so much darker than the bright parts. I can see that the velvet lining around the screen is an even darker black, but that doesn't prevent me from perceiving parts of the image as black.

To add further, I don't think we could create true black anymore than we could achieve absolute zero in temperature. Though the latter is a condition (or lack of them), true black is a perception. It's absolute nothingness. Much like how your eyes perceive your home theater screen, the mountains by where I live disappear everyday with the setting of the sun. Mountains as we all know, are enormous. They are full of life and color, and as the sun sets, they become a silhouette of their former selves, and eventually they fade away completely as if they are not there at all. But they are there, they did not vanish into thin air; it's just that my eyes can no longer perceive them, and the image 'fades to black'. When you think about black in this manner, it really makes you wonder what is out there in the deepness of the oceans, and the vastness of outer space.

The pool example you quoted is also interesting. I am not a science guru, and you already took things beyond my own comprehension, but I do wonder about if we painted the entire bottom of an Olympic-sized pool as close to black as we could get, exactly how much energy would it absorb from the sun? This is of course before it is filled with water, but the blacker it is, the hotter it is going to get; eventually becoming a giant frying pan. At a certain point and ignoring any leidenfrost effect, it would become increasingly difficult to even put water into the pool without instantly vaporizing it. The water that can remain would come to a boil pretty close to immediately.

[Vickii]

I see you did science in school, not art. Black is a colour when you are painting or using dye, to obtain it you need to mix all the three primaries. A little less of one of the three primaries gives a "shade of black" like onyx or licorice.

As the request is for a dye... black will be a colour, and it can have shades.

(artistically, bumpmap and specular on armour is going to make the purest black nigh on hard/impossible to be standard - it will work on some things, not others).

No. There is no shades of black or white. Just light or dark shades of grey. Black is when no other color is present.

[tdb]

The pool example you quoted is also interesting. I am not a science guru, and you already took things beyond my own comprehension, but I do wonder about if we painted the entire bottom of an Olympic-sized pool as close to black as we could get, exactly how much energy would it absorb from the sun?

An olympic size swimming pool is 50 by 25 metres, so it has an area of about 1250 square metres. If painted a perfect black and with sun shining from directly overhead, it would absorb around 1.3 megawatts of power. Examples of things with the same magnitude of power: a small locomotive, a medium-sized data center or about three 18-wheelers.

This is of course before it is filled with water, but the blacker it is, the hotter it is going to get; eventually becoming a giant frying pan.

There's actually a limit to how hot it can get. The hotter it is, the more heat will be radiated into the air (and eventually space) as well as conducted into the ground. I did some calculations and it looks like it could reach around 100 °C over typical ambient temperature, but not much more than that. A higher ambient temperature makes the gap somewhat narrower because thermal radiation follows a quartic law. Still, you'd have an easier time frying things in California than Greenland.

At a certain point and ignoring any leidenfrost effect, it would become increasingly difficult to even put water into the pool without instantly vaporizing it. The water that can remain would come to a boil pretty close to immediately.

Assuming you built this in a magical place with the sun permanently overhead and an ambient temperature of 50 °C, it could reach a temperature of around 130 °C. Not quite enough for Leidenfrost effect, which in the case of water requires temperatures closer to 200 °C. If the pool has one metre of concrete on all sides, the total volume of concrete is about 2000 cubic metres. Structural concrete has a specific heat capacity of 1 kJ/kg°C and a density of 2400 kg/m³. After it drops below 100 °C it's no longer able to boil water so we're interested in how much heat it can give off in the span of those 30 degrees. Multiplying the relevant values together gives an impressive 144 GJ. Since we're in a pretty hot environment it takes 2.5 GJ to heat up and boil a cubic metre of water, so the pool's stored heat would be able to boil the first 50-odd cubic metres poured into it before cooling down below the boiling point of water.

Most of the incoming power is in visible light wavelengths, but the pool will radiate in far infrared. A cover made of a material which lets visible light pass in but prevents the infrared from getting out would trap the heat inside, significantly increasing the temperature. Even so, there's only enough power input to boil about two cubic metres per hour. To fill a pool of that size you'll certainly want more flow than that. As a point of comparison, a firehose can spew out more than 30 cubic metres of water per hour. A 500 °C pool would be able to boil away the water from a firehose for about 26 hours (taking into account the extra heat from the sun during that time), but eventually it would cool down and water would be able to stay liquid.

[TheMightyMollusk]

I feel the need to repeat that the tumblr account that wrote up the "exploding pool" thing was named facts-i-just-made-up. if you read the whole thing, it goes on to talk about how the vaporizing chlorine in the pool water would create an airborne zombie gas. The whole thing was a joke.

[tdb]

I feel the need to repeat that the tumblr account that wrote up the "exploding pool" thing was named facts-i-just-made-up. if you read the whole thing, it goes on to talk about how the vaporizing chlorine in the pool water would create an airborne zombie gas. The whole thing was a joke.

I'm not sure if this is directed at me, but I'm well aware of the nature of that tumblr post. I just took the joke and applied copious amounts of science to it. I've tried to remain true to scientific facts, though the temperature stuff is based on some gross simplifications due to the number of variables involved. And the 500 °C value I pulled out of my hat just to demonstrate that the power input from the sun is simply not sufficient to keep the water in a pool boiling indefinitely.