Spaghetti hair in the graphic update

[Valence]

Hello,

First I want to thank the development team for their incredible efforts into bringing us a new benchmark to adjust and address most of the feedback that has been given. You didn't even need to give us an actual second benchmark as you could have just shown us the correction through pictures and videos, so I am appreciative of the effort.

I want however to point out at something that has been bugging me for years and that the new graphic update didn't seem to address in any way, shape or form: the hair textures in the game make hair look like spaghetti. Most hairstyles but a few have textures that are literally drawn like our favorite pasta and it seriously bugs me how unsatisfying it looks.

It gets even worse with the update because not only the texture resolution has been improved, so the spaghetti is less blurry and pixelated and more obvious to see, but it also clashes even more with the rest of the update that looks more realistic and overall way better. It feels to me that hair rendering, especially compared to other new FF titles like FF7:R, has a 10+ year gap with the new characters' looks. Hair textures just feel like from another time era and it shows.

Could you do something about it, even if not for release?

Taken from the pictures shown in the last lodestone announcement, those hair textures are not satisfying to look at, at all:

[Roda]

It really kind of feels like when a beginner artist tries to draw every strand of hair.

The lalafell in the after looks a bit better, but the miqo'te is rough with those dark shadows on every strand and white hair. (also that clear, what 130 degree angle bend on that clump of 6 strands in that red circle?)

It generally does look better on characters with darker hair because the shadows blend in more.



Forgive the sub-minute hackjobs I hope you can get the idea while understanding that I didn't wanna bust my butt deciphering what resolution the hair textures are and then recreating them and editing those recreations...

vs



The fact that the male lala's hair is less severe in the "after" side gives me hope that they're addressing this

[Valence]

To bring it more into perspective as well, if you compared it to ff16 hair textures for example, which is a game created by the same team and shares a lot of similarities visually, the gap is abyssmal. Now, I'm not saying that I'm actually expecting the same amount of finer details on a MMO, and I also know that the goal was stated not to fall into ultra realistic, but do I dare hope to find at least a middle ground?



I'm bringing up 2 different sore points for me on XIV's hair:

1) The shadering itself, which doesn't seem to follow the updates on the other parts of the faces, notably on normal and PBR mappings. It looks like hair to me is still stuck in pre PBR technologies (aka specular textures).
2) The art itself, which essentially draws big fat spaghetti or mops.

[Larirawiel]

It really kind of feels like when a beginner artist tries to draw every strand of hair.

The lalafell in the after looks a bit better, but the miqo'te is rough with those dark shadows on every strand and white hair. (also that clear, what 130 degree angle bend on that clump of 6 strands in that red circle?)

It generally does look better on characters with darker hair.

The problem is, the hair still consists of low polygon geometries. They have only increased the texture resolution. And this is the reason why it looks so weird.



Cheers

[Jeeqbit]

I actually think this is a model problem. They created the hair models with a very limited amount of polygons. They are effectively a bunch of triangles mashed together. So the result is the hair is just textured on.

Whereas the hair is clearly not made like that in FF16 and it appears every strand is an actual strand.

They can't really go back and change it for old hair styles without flat out remaking all the hair models they've ever made. But maybe there is hope for future hair models where they should be able to use more polygons?

The introduction of Clive into FF14 could be a preview of what they can manage https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comme...image_by_ff14/

[Taliriah]

I actually think this is a model problem. They created the hair models with a very limited amount of polygons. They are effectively a bunch of triangles mashed together. So the result is the hair is just textured on.

Whereas the hair is clearly not made like that in FF16 and it appears every strand is an actual strand.

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.

[DynnDiablos]

It's not going to change and folks just need to be happy they've addressed many of the main complaints. The INSANE crunch and overtime this team is working through just to deliver on 6/28 is over the top thanks to you folks. Be happy you're getting anything at all.

[Valence]

I actually think this is a model problem. They created the hair models with a very limited amount of polygons. They are effectively a bunch of triangles mashed together. So the result is the hair is just textured on.

Whereas the hair is clearly not made like that in FF16 and it appears every strand is an actual strand.

They can't really go back and change it for old hair styles without flat out remaking all the hair models they've ever made. But maybe there is hope for future hair models where they should be able to use more polygons?

The introduction of Clive into FF14 could be a preview of what they can manage https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comme...image_by_ff14/

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.

After that, they'd need to actually port them to PBR tech and shaders like they have done for the rest of the character parts, which means making metallicness and glossiness maps as well as normal maps to get actual grain come out of the texture.

The meshes can stay as they are right now. At best they can subdivide them and add more triangles but that's not the core of the issue by far.

FF14 Clive import has the same issue, although it's one of the least egregious hairstyles for sure (and it's also possible it still tries to conform to the old engine).

Only my opinion though, since I haven't seen all the actual details of their graphic processes especially when it comes to the new update.

[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.

[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