#gpose tutorial

So I've been desperate to replicate the teary eye effect we see in cutscenes (mostly Tataru unleashing her LB3 on WoLs) and all similar questions I've seen on the crime tool discords are met with the same "can't be done, photoshop it" line of answers if any. So if you have zero photoshopping skills like me and want a fix of that sweet angst, here's a quick way to fake it in-game directly while gposing:

(Requires very basic Anamnesis or Brio experience)

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(You might want this to be the last step after you're done posing your character, since you'll be dealing with a hand prop.)

Equip this prop to both your main and offhand, by typing in the numbers: 9072, 1, 1. and click below them to "show weapon."

2. Now since they're tiny little droplets, they'll be hard to see, so I suggest you click on the weapon bone in your preferred posing mode and scale them up to around 5. Raising the z value (3rd one) slightly higher makes the droplets rounder and easier to work with. And if the size doesn't change for some reason, try scaling the root or abdomen bone instead of the weapon bone.

3. Shove that thing up your eye (lovingly). It helps if you rotate each droplet sideways so that its shape matches that of your eye. (smaller tip toward your inner eye corner, large tip toward the outer corner)

4. Now the fun part! You can do this several ways: If you want the full-on LB3-level brimming-with-tears effect like Tataru's, just keep tweaking the scale of the droplet til it's about the size of your eye and position it just over the whole eye, tweaking and rotating until it fits perfectly inside your eyelids without clipping out, et voila.

The LB2 level: Another (more realistic?) way would be to lower the droplets to have them "well up" around your lower eyelids:

LB1 level: Or you can simply lay the droplets at their original size at the outer corners of your eyes for a "threatening to turn on the waterworks but can be assuaged with cake" effect

Bonus tips for extra realism:

- As with most other things, best to avoid symmetry

- Mix & match shapes & sizes

- The more dramatic your lighting the more dramatic they'll look

First, let me say thank you so much for your admiration! It really means a lot to me!💙

Now, I'll preface this by saying that I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to the tools I use to gpose. I'm still learning, but I'm more than happy to share what I've gleaned so far!

Let's start with what tools I use for gposing and comics:

XIVLauncher

Brio

Glamourer, Ktisis, and Penumbra (optional, but they have some interactivity with Brio that can come in handy)

Reshade using the Gposingway package (again, optional, but there are some really good reshade presets that can make some gorgeous screenshots even in my inexperienced hands!)

Image editing software (I use Clip Studio Paint, but I think what I do is pretty universal)

Photoshop FFXIV Textboxes by Vladdy

For this tutorial, I'll go over what I did to make the first gpose shot of this comic.

If you have Brio installed, when you first enter gpose, Brio should load automatically (Ktisis is there, too, but we won't worry about that for now)

The first thing I'll usually do is spawn all the actors I'll need for the pose by pressing either of the highlighted "+" buttons and selecting "Spawn New Actor".

After spawning all the actors you need, you can rename them in the actors list like I did here. It's not necessary, but it is handy when you have a lot of actors you're working with. As you can see, whenever you spawn a new actor, they're going to look like your pc in their vanilla game state, so you'll need to load an appearance over them. There are several ways to do this.

If it's a vanilla NPC you're after, you click on the highlighted "Load NPC Appearance" button. It'll pop up a window where search for the NPC you're looking for by name and it'll bring up just about every instance of that NPC from the game. It can be a little daunting sometimes because some NPCs can have hundreds of instances, but USUALLY they'll be listed in reverse order of appearance.

If you're a Glamourer user, you can load a saved Glamourer design over an actor as well! This is great if you have a saved design for a pc, especially not the one you're currently using so you can quickly load their customization options. For this project, I used a saved design for @feistierermine's Bunzo from Valentione's Day.

I don't want Bunzo in his Valentione's glam, though, so I'll need to change his outfit using Brio's Advanced Appearance window, which is opened by clicking the highlighted button while having Bunzo selected in the actors list.

When it first opens, the Advanced Appearance window will be on the equipment tab. Here you can change an actor's equipment anyway that you might need. Change gear, dye it, hide it, you can even spawn props in place of weapons! The Customization tab is used for making any edits needed to an actors character customization options. You can basically make a whole new character using this window!

Another way to load an appearance is to load a character appearance saved within Brio itself by using the highlighted "Import Character" button. You can save the currently selected actor's appearance by clicking the "Export Character" button (located to the right of the Import button).

Now that actor setup is finished, it's time to actually start posing! First comes placing the actors on their preliminary marks. You can use the values in the highlighted "Posing" tab to move the actor around. The top row of values is the actor's position, the second their rotation, and the third is their scale. You can either manually type in new values or click the values and drag left or right to change them.

It doesn't have to necessarily be the next step, but after the actors were on their marks, I started futzing around with the lighting. Brio can do way more advanced lighting than vanilla gpose, but I haven't really learned how to use it yet, so I just use the vanilla tools. Lighting is one of the things I have the weakest grasp on. I generally aim to place light sources that match in world sources, like the aetheryte and lights flanking the entrance behind the group. Then I mess around with the colors and intensity until I get something that looks good but doesn't stick out from the color scheme of the environment.

Now to start putting the actors in poses. Being the novice that I am, I do not have the skill to create poses completely from scratch. I'll either start with an imported pose created by someone way more talented than I or one of the vanilla emotes from the game that I'll then make any necessary small edits to to fit my needs for the pose. For this project I used emotes as a base for all the actors.

For my controlled character, I use the vanilla gpose interface to load up animations. I could use Brio to do this, but the in game interface is much more user friendly imho. For the extra actors, though, I use Brio's "Advanced Animation" control panel, opened by clicking on the highlighted button. In the control panel, you'll see two slots for loading animations. The top slot is for base animations. This is stuff like all emotes, animation cycles, even battle actions! The second slot is for blended animations like expression emotes or emotes that can be done in a non-standing position.

When the actor hits a point in the animation that works for the pose, hit the "Freeze Character" button to lock them in place for screenshotting or, as in the case with Y'shtola here, pose editing.

The base fem miqo'te Aback emote is a little too exaggerated for what I wanted to do with Y'shtola's pose so we're going to edit the pose using Brio's Advanced Posing panel which can be opened up by clicking the highlighted button in the upper right corner of the posing tab. The posing panel mostly consists of the actor's animation skeleton broken into several parts. On the right is the gizmo you can use to rotate bones you can select by clicking on the skeleton. Just click and drag along one of the gizmo's axes and the bone will rotate in that direction. Once a bone is selected, any child bones that will move with the selected bone are highlighted. Also notice that in the Posing tab in the main Brio window, the name of the selected bone is now at the top of the tab. Even if you close the Advanced Posing panel, you can use the values in the Posing tab to pose the bone.

Posing is a super finicky process and if you don't take into consideration how even something as simple as twisting a wrist can cause movement in the rest of the arm all the way up to the shoulder you can get some really distorted body parts. There's a lot of trial and error involved and get ready to make ample use of Brio's undo key!

Once posing's out of the way, it's time for the final touches! I'll position the camera and apply zoom and rotation to try to get a shot composition I'm happy with. I kinda just do this part by intuition. I know there are people that know more about the technical aspects of building shot composition than I do! The only "rule" I use is that if I'm rotating the angle of a shot, I'll try to find some part of the shot that I line up parallel with either the horizontal or the vertical axis of the image. In this case, I picked Lulu's head...

Which didn't matter because I went with a different angle anyway! 😆 Once I'm happy with the angle, I'll enable reshade and pick a preset that works with the scene, hide any open windows, and take my screenshot! Little bonus tip: if you're using reshade, use the reshade screenshot key, not XIV's! It won't pick up any open plugin windows so you'll only have to worry about hiding the gpose window!

Now that I've got my screenshot, it's time to do some editing!

This part is the easy part! I load my screenshot into my image editing software and I also load up the psd for the dialogue boxes.

You might have to reduce the resolution for the dialogue box psd if you're like me and have a potato pc that can only handle the game at 1080p! Then, you'll want to click on the layer folder shown in the example image and copy it and paste it into your screenshot from the game.

Once you've copied the folder over, you can go through the various layers, hiding what you don't want to use in your screenshot. I don't know if it was just because I opened the file in CSP, but it did rasterize the text layer, so I had to hide that and create a new text layer. It's not too hard to do, though. The dialogue box download includes the Meiryo font if you need to install it and it comes really damn close to the dialogue font used in game.

Once that's done, flatten the image and save it and that's it! You're done!

One of the in-game activities I enjoy the most is trying to replicate real-life photography techniques in gpose, and it’s surprising how much can be achieved. So today, let’s play around with composition!

Leading Lines

Leading lines can help guide the viewer's eye through an image. They’re visual elements that form lines, like buildings or roads, or even an area with high contrast, like the horizon line. So by aligning convergent lines to create these ‘focal zones’ you build a sense of depth and lead the viewer's gaze toward it.

Framing

You can use elements within the scene to enclose or surround your main subject. These elements could be natural, like branches or foliage, or architectural, like doorways or windows. This adds depth and context, and helps the viewers immerse themselves in the scene:

Symmetry

Symmetry creates a pleasing sense of order and balance in an image. You can do this by dividing your frame equally and positioning similar elements on either side:

Depth and Layering

Adding depth to your virtual photographs enhances the sense of immersion. By placing objects of interest in the foreground, middle ground, and background, you can create a layered effect that adds depth and dimension to your composition. DoF (Depth of Field) shaders are particularly well suited for cases like these:

Point of View

Experimenting with different and unusual camera angles and perspectives can yield surprisingly dynamic and engaging shots. For example, positioning the camera at a low angle and looking up at the character can create a very impactful composition:

On the other hand, top-down pictures can not only give the viewer a sensation of being ‘in the scene’ but also help put elements together that would otherwise be scattered around in a horizontal shot:

Negative Space

Negative space refers to the empty or minimalistic areas in your composition. It provides breathing room for your main subject and can evoke emotions, or create a sense of balance and calmness.

And let’s not forget the most important rule of all:

Break the rules

These principles serve more as guidelines than anything. Sometimes trying to force a composition into one of those categories can detract from an unusual yet powerful shot, so trust your eye and aesthetic sense.

Hello, I’m Rosa! And I’m here to attempt to help those out there who are either new to using gpose, are confused/intimidated by it, or simply don’t know what gpose is.

To put it simply: gpose is short for Group Pose, a feature in FFXIV mainly used to change how your in-game screenshots look in various ways.

I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen people either struggle with learning how to utilize gpose for nice screenshots, or even just straight-up never realize it’s a thing that exists in FFXIV to begin with. And it results in so much ‘I suck at this’, ‘I can’t take pretty pictures like you guys’, etc.

And I’m here like, ‘YES. Yes you can!’

I know there are bigger and better tutorials out there, but I want to offer what I can in the easiest-to-understand way possible, since gpose is incredibly fun to tinker and experiment with once you get the basics down.

For the record, I will not be using any Reshade filters or mods for this. This is all 100% FFXIV gpose.

This tutorial also only contains PC keybinds, since I’m a PC player. If you’re a PS4 player, I recommend searching up the appropriate binds for your needs!

So without further ado, let’s start at the beginning! Pretty pictures abound!

1. Open gpose. 

Simply go to your chatbox, and type /gpose in there. Like so:

When you hit Enter, you’re now in what’s known as Camera Mode. This gives you more freedom to move the position of your camera than in regular game mode, and lets you access a handy-dandy control panel to fiddle with various settings. We’ll get to that in a moment.

(You can also access gpose in your Actions & Traits menu, found under Extras.)

If you used an emote, expression, or combat action before opening gpose, it will now be cycling over and over. The easiest way to reset this is to exit gpose, have your character /sit and then hop back up, and re-enter gpose.

If there is a certain emote/expression you want your character to be doing for your screenshot, you can do it before entering gpose OR access the list of emotes from the gpose control panel. Note that combat actions can only be performed before entering gpose.

2. Move the camera!

As mentioned, you can access a lot more camera angles now! Try using your W and S keys, for instance, and pull the camera way up..

Or down low!

Your A and D keys can also move the camera horizontally (left/right)!

First person also works in gpose, so hit your Home key to try it out!

3. The control panel, also known as Group Pose Settings.

It’s not visible when you open gpose, but it’s the key to using the feature to its fullest. Usually the default keybind to bring it up is R, but if that does nothing, hit the key/button that your Auto-Run is bound to. It’s bound to the same key.

There’s a lot of stuff here, I know. But it’s really not as scary and convoluted as it looks, and all the settings are labeled to give you an idea of what they do. I won’t go into every single setting; experimenting is half the fun, so don’t be afraid to press buttons and try things out! But I will point out the ones that will solve a lot of the ‘I don’t know how to do this’.

4. The Face Camera button.

This utilizes your character’s head-tracking; meaning that wherever you position your camera and toggle the button on (you’ll know it’s on by the border around the button), they will look at you!

You can also turn this on/off easily with the spacebar.

This toggle can be used in many ways to make your character look in a certain direction. Depending on what you have them doing, their whole body may turn during an emote/ability, or sometimes it’s just their eyes that move. It varies between emotes/actions.

5. Camera Position and Color Filter make a ton of difference alone.

The first slider for Camera Position allows you to zoom in and out a lot further than you normally can. (Try using your scroll function after adjusting the slider too!) This is how people get those nice close-ups!

The second slider is used to turn your view clockwise or counter-clockwise. This can also be done with the Q and E keys on your keyboard.

This slider is largely useful for artistic angles, and makes taking full-body shots a breeze!

Color Filter is just what it says! It’s a drop-down list, and there are many to choose from, so try ‘em out and see what you like! One I tend to favor is Bright 4, since it makes the colors far more vibrant.

6. Emotes and Expressions time!

Note the little running man icon on the left side of the controls, and click on it.

This will bring you to the Motion Settings panel. Here, you can:

Toggle your character walking/running/sprinting in place.

Access your emote window.

Toggle whether gpose picks up combat actions, or makes your character face someone you’re currently targetting outside gpose when the Face Camera button is off.

When you apply an emote, you can: 

Pause/unpause your character’s animations using the Disable/Enable All Motion button up top (bound to your 1 key). This also applies to the animations of others around you if they’re on your Friends List/in your FC or Party. This is HIGHLY useful for easy rapidfire pauses to get that pose just right. 

You can also use the button beside it, Disable/Enable Target Motion (bound to your 2 key) to adjust ONLY your character, or whoever you are currently controlling. If you have a friend with you, you can click on their character (or use the Tab key) and switch to their perspective!

But keep in mind, you cannot change someone else’s emotes/expressions.

Note that emotes and expressions can be applied at the same time! Try mixing and matching different ones together and see what kinds of poses you can create!

7. Light ‘er up!

The last thing I will touch on is lighting, which can be accessed by clicking on the lamp icon on the left.

Here we have Lighting Settings. And wouldn’t you know it, it turned to night-time when I briefly left gpose!

Moonlight is nice and all, but using gpose, we can use a maximum of 3 extra light sources to brighten things up a bit.

These buttons toggle each light source, which can be adjusted with the sliders below.

(Note that Lighting 1 can also be toggled with the lamp icon up top.)

The Types under each Lighting simply determine how big/bright that light’s radius is.

Type 1 is the smallest/dimmest and Type 3 is the largest/brightest.

Type 1 is ideal for lighting up just a small area, like around your character, and the other two will cover more of your character’s surroundings.

Each set of 3 sliders are simply the Red-Green-Blue values.

You can also choose where to put down your light sources, as well as how close or far they are by zooming in/out. So if we place one down on one side of Rosa..

And a slightly dimmer one on the other side..

Now we can see her lovely face again!

You can do a lot of neat things with lighting, and the effect will differ depending on things like your selected filter, location, weather, and time of day/night as well. It can completely change the mood of your environment, so experiment!

Or you can just torment your victim subject like me.

The possibilities are endless.

And those are what I consider the basics of gpose knowledge! There are other things to play with as well, but the majority of them are simply extras for personal preference. There’s no such thing as a ‘perfect’ way to do it, just play with things and see what strikes your fancy!

As another beloved redheaded lady says: Take chances, get messy, make mistakes! 

And most importantly..

A while ago I got a request for advice on what sorts of visual references to provide an artist you are commissioning, and ever since then I’ve been meaning to whip up a guide. And then the guide became several guides because I have specific tips for specific things. I’ve bought a lot of commissions AND I am an artist myself, so I have experience on both sides of the transaction. As such, I have definitely learned how to make life easier both for the person paying and for the person drawing. 

Tips are below the cut.

We've all been there: 50M gil burning white hot in your pocket when a set of Fallen Angel Wings pop in the market board, its siren's call luring you. Now you're utterly fashionable, but regrettably with barely half a mil Gil to your name. What to do?

Well, do not give to despair, my glamorous friend! You can actually build a perfect black background studio to show off your feathery acquisition.

You'll need:

1 x FC Room, or an Apartment

3 x White Screens

1-2 x platforms of your choice

4-5 Soot Black dyes

1 - Setup

Place your White Screens in parallel, in order to completely cover a wall. (This will give you some leeway with angles and point light placement.)

Make sure you leave a considerable gap, of maybe half the length of the base of a White Screen. This is important, as you'll see very soon.

Place the objects you'll use as platforms in front and center of the white panel line, making sure it overlaps with the middle panel. This is where you'll stand: In the example below I floated two Combed Wool Rugs, but any contiguous platform will do (think tables, half-partitions, etc.)

Dye all the objects with Soot Black. No need for the expensive stuff.

Now let's reduce the ambient light, setting it to zero; we'll use only GPose lighting for shots.

2 - What's the catch?

Well, you see - most partitions, like the Blank Riviera partition, have a collision box set around them. If a camera touches it, its path is altered so it doesn't go behind the partition.

White Screens, however, do NOT have a collision box - so you can move your camera behind the partitions, and place your light sources there.

Here's how it looks in gpose - notice how the camera just goes through the partition:

Amazing, right? So the trick is to place light sources behind the panels, in the gap between the back of the panels and the wall; this way, the light won't hit the front surfaces.

The final result is a shot with a perfect pitch-black background, where rim lights can be applied with very intense results:

You can also place Type-1 light points in front, so they offer a very gentle illumination while not hitting the background panels:

Another possible setup: move the character away from the background, and place the light sources around it.

That'll result in shots like this one:

You can also place a point light between the character and the background, to create a halo effect:

The opportunities for dramatic lighting are endless.

Now that we know some basic lighting techniques, it's time to wander into the wild!

There's a lot that's out of your control, like weather and natural light. But let's use those to our advantage!

Supplemental Lighting

Remember: you can use the 3-point light sources and the Character lighting settings to bring attention to the subject, making it pop from the background.

In the example below, Freya is pretty dim against the background; so we position a yellow source to reinforce the torch light and a blue source to suggest moonlight.

Oh, one interesting thing about water surfaces: while point lights can't cast shadows...

...it can reflect over water surfaces!

The principle of using a point light to enhance, reinforce or suggest a source can be used anywhere: fixtures, skybox sources, armor, weapons... the sky (well, and the count of 3) is the limit.

Less is more

Simplify your shots. Visual elements draw attention away from the subject. By using Depth of Field (DoF) you can force background elements to lose focus.

Alternatively, you can look for parts of the background with fewer elements (like the sky, a cave wall, or a dark patch of a forest.)

Weather

Dungeons and open areas have wildly different lighting patterns. Don't fight it: instead, try to adjust your sources to enhance the feeling. Overcast weather gives less contrast, the same as night shots. On the other hand, Some instances can give very harsh light. Use it to your advantage.

Environment

Use it. The fact that you're not locked into place means that you can have better action shots, using the environment to help tell a story.

Also, the Golden Hour is real. Sunrises and sunsets give amazing opportunities for shots.

Night shots have their own characteristics, but they're basically similar to studio shots. So rim lights and key lights can bring subjects to the foreground, even if they're wearing dark clothing.

Sometimes the environment is the focus. Draw your character away, and let the beauty of Etheirys sink in.

Framing

Look out for structures that can help isolate your character from the background.

Now that I mentioned these points, let's see how (and why) some shots were taken!

Low contrast, DoF isolating from the noisy background, orange point light to Noemie's right, white-bluish point light to the top left.

High contrast, strong orange point light to the right of Louise, and a white point far to the left.

Here the scenario is totally irrelevant (apart from the general grey tone), So ADoF+Bubble, ADoF + Bokeh, a single white point from the sun's direction, and a high Character lighting.

Today we'll escape the boundaries of the game and use a mix of recording and editing tools to create a neat orbiting camera video!

For this recipe, you'll need:

1 x PC (these instructions were tested on Windows 10)

1 x FFXIV Client

1 x screen recording tool (Geforce Experience, Radeon Adrenaline, etc.)

1 x Avidemux (https://avidemux.sourceforge.net/)

GShade to taste

1 - Setup

Let's open the Character Configuration under Settings. in the General tab, locate the Camera Speed (Keyboard) slider, and set it to zero. This will give us that smooth, slow camera movement.

At this point, you need the screen recording tool ready. I have GeForce Experience, so I'm using the Instant Replay function to save the last 5 minutes of gameplay; YMMV.

2 - Capture

Let's enter GPose. Position the camera so your character takes most of the screen while leaving some padding around, turn off the UI (Scroll Lock or LB+Back), and move your cursor to a corner.

Start recording, and use the Left/Right arrow keys to orbit the camera around your character. If your character is frozen (Target Motion toggled off) a couple of full circles are enough. At this point, you can stop the recording.

3 - Editing

Launch Avidemux and open the raw video. Now we're going to adjust some values.

First, let's disable the audio. On the top menu, select Audio > Select Track, then uncheck all the Enabled checkboxes. This will mute the video.

Filters are how we'll modify the original video. By default, the Video Output is set to Copy; in order to enable filters, we need to select a custom encoder. Let's pick one that's pretty common and compatible across most services; in my case, I selected NVidia H264.

Now the Filters button should be enabled. Click it; the Video Filter Manager interface should open.

These are the filters I'm using for this video:

Crop (to eliminate the unwanted background, bring attention to the character and set the target 1:1 aspect ratio)

Contrast (to prep it for devices with better luminance range, like phones)

swsResize (to create a smaller video file)

4 - Trimming

Now, the tricky part: In order to create a seamless, cycling orbit movement, the first frame of your video must match nicely with the last.

The way I do this is by browsing the video (Click the slider at the bottom, then use the Left/Right arrow keys) for a frame with a clear feature (say, a light source coming behind the character), clicking Set End Marker (Control + PGDOWN), then Delete Selection (DEL). This will eliminate all frames up to that point.

Now, I locate the exact same frame later in the animation once the character is spun around once, click Set Starter Marker (Control + PGUP), then Delete Selection (DEL). If done correctly, now you have a full cycle!

Finally, the output format: Select MP4 Muxer, again a compatible format that'll work nicely with services like Twitter and Tumblr.

And… that's it, really! Now click Save Video and give the new file a name.