Housing graphics update

[StrangeSkirt]

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.







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.














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:





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

[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.

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.

[Tako-Takemi]

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):

After (Dawntrail 7.0):



Before (Endwalker):

After (Dawntrail 7.0):



Before (Endwalker):

After (Dawntrail 7.0):


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.

[CidHeiral]

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.

[SeerValtial]

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.

[StrangeSkirt]

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.

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

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.

[StrangeSkirt]

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.

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/

[Merton9999]

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

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.

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.

[StrangeSkirt]

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.

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".

[Solowing]

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.