FFXIV - Making The 2023 Halloween Poster Real

• 12 November 2023
• Projects,
• Final Fantasy XIV,
• Modding,
• Physical,
• Vector Art

Written 2024-11-04, backdated to 2023-11-12 (date of project completion).

Final Fantasy XIV has a whole bunch of seasonally recurring events - Heavensturn, Valentione's Day, Little Ladies' Day, Hatching-tide, the Moonfire Faire, The Rising, Starlight - but my favourite among them all is All Saint's Wake, a yearly Halloween-themed event that usually includes themed in-game outfit rewards, housing decorations, or even mounts and emotes.

Of course, the in-game cities themselves match the date by putting up Halloween decorations all over, and-- oh,

Oh my god. Oh god. Wow oh my gosh

I first saw those posters during the 2023 event and immediately decided that I wanted these in my actual house really really really really really badly. In the past, I'd done one or two projects rooted in exporting level geometry and textures from the game for various purposes, so the plan was pretty straightforward:

1. Find and export the relevant texture from the game
2. Based off the texture, create a higher-resolution version
3. Figure out a good local place to have one printed as a small poster

The Export

For the export - as in the Crystarium Inn Room Project - I used Godbert, an incredibly helpful tool for dumping and examining ingame areas.

The All Saint's Wake event generally takes place in Old Gridania, which in the game files has the ID e0205. Looking at the area through the viewer, I noticed something neat: all the seasonal decorations - for every single event - are permanently part of the map data, meaning that in the level geometry renderer, you can see them all side by side like so:

And then one quick…

…export…

…later, we see the many textures:

At this point, there wasn't much of a choice but to dig through them all by eye. Thankfully, I'd previously set up thumbnails for the .DDS texture files, and the Everything search tool^[1] made it easy to filter & browse through the relevant textures.

And there it was, bgcommon_world_hal_003_texture_w_hal_003_hat_d.tex.dds.

The Vector Art

Of course, by itself, this wasn't remotely print-ready. The total texture was only 512px by 512px in resolution, with the cat poster itself measuring 128px wide and 184px high:

So I popped it into Inkscape and started tracing the shapes as best I could:

Thankfully, the bats are all identical, so I only had to match its shape once:

And at long last,

The Final Result

The poster, scalable to any resolution at all without any loss in quality!

I won't go into the process of having it printed locally, because there's really not much interesting stuff to say there. Several drugstore chains around here do prints, photo or otherwise. I did have to adjust the aspect ratio a little to match the available print sizes, but it was smooth sailing besides that.

The result is lying on top of a shelf right now, because in the end, I couldn't actually decide where I wanted to hang it... such is life. It was a fun project regardless, and I'm happy with the result! Feel free to download that SVG above and have one printed out yourself, if you like.

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