I haven’t gotten much glamouring done over the past few days, as I’m at a point where I’m pretty happy with most everything I’ve put together recently. Instead, a lot of my idle time has been spent on decorating, since the S.O. and I were able to get a Medium house in a subdivision of the Mist for our little Free Company. While she did the lion’s share of the decorating, I claimed the basement, where I put together a comfortable lounge based on a similar room I built for the Free Company I used to run on Diabolos.
The whole thing took me a few days to put together, with the majority of the time being spent on the bath area. Normally when I do any sort of housing decoration and layout, I rely heavily on the snap to grid functions, since I’m very particular about things being arrayed and lined up in an exacting fashion. I wasn’t able to do that with the bath, though, as the designated space for it (next to the stairs) didn’t allow me to fit all of the things I needed. That meant I had to spend tons of time getting things lined up manually, and I’m entirely positive that I’d never be able to recreate what I did there (so let’s hope I never have to dismantle it!). I’m really happy with the end result, though!
Once that was complete (and then, a few days later, the rest of the house decorated), I had another housing project to work on. For quite some time now, there’s been a “FFXIV Studio Lighting” hashtag on Twitter (#FFXIV_SL), dedicated to screenshots taken using various housing items to create portrait studios. I’ve wanted to put together a studio for glamour shots for a long time, but I didn’t want to dedicate space in my small apartment since it would otherwise limit what else I could do with the room. With the possibility of migrating my apartment layout to a Free Company chamber, though, I was free to use the space for something else!
Right now, the setup is really basic: three White Partitions, two Indirect Wall Lighting unites, two Dragon Floor Lamps, and a Troupe Stage. I’m still working on getting a good standard lighting array, which is something that would be a lot easier if we weren’t limited to only two Indirect Lighting units per estate (I really don’t understand what that limitation is there for!). Preliminary results have been pretty nice, though, and I tested the setup with a couple of my current glamours. I did my Monk glamour, first, since I’m still obsessed with Alahra in the Pacifist’s Vest:
I spent probably a good hour taking Monk shots, testing out various arrangements for the light sources and light levels for the apartment as a whole. I’m fairly happy with things as they are now, though I’m still waffling about how much total light I’ll need, since the ultimate goal is to use the studio to eliminate the need for post-adjustments to the screenshots for brightness concerns. I’m conflicted, though, because the screenshots tend to look better with lower light levels than higher ones. Once I got my fill of my Monk shots, I tried things out with my current Ninja glamour as well:
Moving forward, I’ll probably be using a combination of shots from the studio and shots taken out in the game world for new Glamour Spotlights, since I think I’ll still want to have headers with varied backgrounds to keep things interesting. Having a standardized lighting array will be an amazing help, though, especially during those times when the in-game day and weather aren’t cooperating with my need to take copious amounts of screenshots.
In other news, it looks like after the upcoming maintenance, Housing plots will once again be purchasable by individuals. They’re lifting that restriction much sooner than I imagined they would, as the team tends to be very slow to move on things like that, but I’m glad to see things being opened up. Personally, I’m going to try to fulfill my dream of having a Small plot in Shirogane, but with the FC house we have now, I’m really pretty happy, so if I’m held back by the Queue Boss, I won’t be devastated or anything. Hopefully this last round of new Wards is enough to meet most of the demand (especially with the new restrictions on plots per account and countermeasures against house flipping for a profit).
Fashion Ninjutsu 