I don't generally post on forums (this is literally my first post ever here), but I was motivated enough that I hope someone might read this and consider it, if people in the community team monitor threads like these... please be kind, I'm not accustomed to publicly voicing my opinions on forums.
As someone who cares a lot about how his character looks, and cares about expression of fashion and coordination, when multiple dye channels being added for older gear was announced, I was ecstatic-- but I've so far been troubled by the implementation. Take the Adventuring Sweater, for instance.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...m/fc7cf521da2/
With the default colors, it has a green shawl over a gray sweater, but when it had a single channel, the entire garment was dyed, the shawl a darker variant and the sweater a lighter one. So naturally, when the dye channel expansion was announced, I expected to be able to dye these elements separately, which I was very excited about!
However, the primary dye channel remains the same, while the second channel dyes the bit of cord on the metallic ornament...
This doesn't augur well to me. There are many sets that dye the entirety of a garment's materials where a split between two channels would give them great additional potential for glamour application (sets like Replica Dreadwyrm, where the leather-look scales and the fabric dye in parallel and make them look cheap, along with most sets from Heavensward which suffer a similar problem). I was looking forward to these sets in particular having their materials separated into individual dye channels.
My hypothesis for why this isn't being done is, the developers may be concerned or sensitive about people who purchased cash shop dyes or rare dyes off the marketboard, and used them on items, only to have the dyes changed-- to this I say, why not have the existing single dye apply to both channels when an item is upgraded from one to two dye channels? Is this a realistic reason to keep a large number of the game's gear pieces, which will be having their textures and mapping upgraded in the upcoming 7.x patches anyway, looking cheap or ugly when dyed?
In my personal experience as a 3D artist, if work is already being done to improve the visual fidelity, it should be a relatively simple matter of creating black-and-white masks for the dye channels on these new high-resolution elements, provided the workflow is similar to the industry standard.
I'm not here to disparage it as "laziness", as work is work, no matter how trivial it would seem, and the undertaking has been enormous this expansion... but while the team is working on the textures and masking for roughness/specularity/metallic/etc, wouldn't it be prudent to consider reworking the dye channels at the same time, instead of simply reusing the existing ones?
Splitting existing channels on items like the Adventuring Sweater would make me very happy!