Final Fantasy XV - As time goes by in Tsumura Lab

Hot on the heels of yesterday's FFXV blog post about Shinji Hashimoto at the Uncovered Final Fantasy XV after party, we have another blog post from Taji (one of the Japanese FFXV community managers) about the flow of time in FFXV!

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I’m here once again with a report from the development area!

Today, I will be talking to... Mr. Tsumura from the lighting team! The lighting team creates the skies and weather in FFXV! Incidentally, Mr. Tsumura is also known as Tsumura Lab!

※ This is Tsumura Lab!

Why is he called that? Because... Look at this:

※ Head Mount Display – Made by hand, at the Tsumura residence

And this:

※ Reflectometer – Made by hand, also (of course) at the Tsumura residence

He makes these things by himself! If there is anything he finds interesting and he wants to know more, he will study up on it! He’s a researcher through and through! In fact, there are lectures in the office where attendees gather to read about his findings. It’s no wonder they call him Tsumura Lab!

So! As a new researcher at Tsumura Lab, I, Taji, submit my report!

We’re going to talk about how time changes in FFXV! We have been tweeting and blogging about FFXV character animations and monsters up until now but we haven’t talked about how time flows inside the game, have we?

So that will be our focus today!

Like in the real world, there are 24 hours a day in the world of FFXV. In order to create the flow of these hours, we had to get as close as possible to the real world, with the sun and the moon, and mornings and evenings. So we check if the skies in the game are correctly being simulated with just the sun and sky! First, we take a photo of the real sun and blue skies.

※ A 360 HDR panorama shot at an undisclosed location in Tokyo.

Then we take that information and drop it into the game but simply dropping it in the game wouldn’t make the lighting work right, so we employ a system called the Sky System to make adjustments to the skies in FFXV.

※ Left: Real sky in the game. Right: Adjusted with the Sky System.

Not much of a difference between the two, right? But in the real world, as we experience our mornings, days, and nights, there is not one minute, or one second, where light is the same. For instance, the sun is 400,000 times brighter than the moon, though it’s impossible for the human eye to detect! To get closer to that in FFXV, the sun is set to shine more than 100,000 times brighter than the moon. Again, you may not be able to detect it, but there is not one second of the same brightness within the game! But it’s not enough to just recreate 100,000 times the brightness. We have to adjust the exposure so that the lighting is always just right within the game. That’s what the Sky System does!

So let’s take a look at how time flows in FFXV!

Dawn 4:30:00

The morning glow. Nice! I love it!

Morning 5:10:00

It looks a little chilly, but you can tell that the sun has risen compared to 40 minutes ago!

Daytime 12:00:00

That looks like feel-good weather! By the way, the three objects are test objects made by Mr. Tsumura. The object in the middle shows a reflection of the sky!

Dusk 18:50

This makes me feel like going to the beach. Just look at the gradation of the sunset...

Night 21:00

The stars are beautiful! And the clouds are shining from the moonlight! We sure don’t see skies like these over Shinjuku! Lol!

What do you think? There is a close link between light and time. And I hope I was able to convey to you that they govern a critical element in the realism within FFXV! I hope you can enjoy the passage of light and time when you play the game!

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