Final Fantasy XIV - Lighting

Azaraen

I recently got into FFXIV, and I am really enamored with the lighting in the game. I especially like the way the light reflects off of the models.

By your opinion, what would you say FFXIV used for lighting? Image Based Lighting or Physically Based Lighting? I'm just starting to understand what those two are, but I couldn't determine by observation what kind of lighting was used. My guess? I think image based lighting, because it reminds me of the kind of lighting in marmoset. Especially on the metal surfaces.

iniside

Honestly, It looks pretty prev-gen for me 0_o. I havent noticed anything special about it.

Shadownami92

Isn't image based lighting normally used as part of physically based rendering? At least that's how it seemed when looking at presentations from Epic and looking at one of the PBR shader sets for Unity. Somehow I don't think that FFXIV is using physically based shaders though. Though the engine it's using I remember being quite resource heavy and I don't see all that much texture definition when it comes to the difference between shiny and more diffused objects, at least I don't see it masked much.

If anything I just think they did a good job with their lighting the good old fashioned way, there is probably some nice lightmaps baked in though and maybe even some sort of GI.

Azaraen

aw man, i've been hearing that, but it looks like it has great spec areas, and metal lighting! Maybe they updated it recently? I know the PS4 is being included to the game, so maybe they did some fixes to the textures. In any case, I know its not next-gen graphics, but it looks great for MMO standards. (i think!)

Eric Chadwick

Metal looks like standard cubemapping to me. If you blur the cubemap properly, you can get that soft brushed-metal look. We have a little bit about that on the wiki http://wiki.polycount.net/DiffuselyConvolvedCubeMap

The rest of the lighting looks like a directional shadow-casting light (sun) mixed with an ambient cube (a heavily blurred low-res cubemap that's light above, dark below), and the occasional point light here and there.

We did something similar on a different MMO, except we used the reverse angle of the directional as our ambient light. Some shots. http://ericchadwick.com/img/mmo_worldbuilding.html

Lighting has to be pretty simple for a MMO because you could have so many characters on screen at the same time, the framerate would take a nose-dive if the lighting was too complex.

Azaraen

I will try that cubemapgen! When you say "ambitent cube", is that a cubemap that will have to apply to each shader?

And I think what I have also found out, is that I am having difficulty just making a good looking brushed metal shader. But thank you very much for giving me those links! I will definitely keep in my go to resource. Great stuff on your site! Thank you so much.

Eric Chadwick

Yes, in each shader.

Usually an ambient cube will be added as part of the "lighting model" which is a separate part of the shader. This is so the cubes can be switched dynamically as the character or object moves in the game from one area to another.

There's an older whitepaper from Valve that talks about this, in Half Life 2. Don't have the link handy, sorry.