Guild Wars 2

Call it a bug, call it a quirk, but either way its something I don’t want change.

Specifically, I talk about how Sylvari armor and even their skin/hair reacts to light in comparison to other races. For some reason, the armor and skin is just that much more shiny and reflective then just about anything else.

The screenshot below had me stop, look, and take a screencap of it with finally seeing Celestial Dye radiate as the name suggests. Seeing that Leaf skirt quite literally GLOW caught my attention.
(The gloves are CoF Light dyed Winter Ice. Quite surprised they shined almost as well as the skirt did.)

Now if only I could figure out the T3-Sylvari Shoulders better.

Anyways, does this only happen with the Celestial Dyes or was it just the armor in question combined with the in-game time of day/spot?

Your character is cute!

wow, nice
never saw the point of celestial until now

Bought the dye because of that pic:P

I think it’s because of the lightning in that particular area. Try doing CoF and you’ll see your Celestial, not show up as white at all

From my understanding all the Natural metallic dye do have some sort of glow effect. There are only 13 of these dye by the way. Celestial, white gold, icing, mint frost, silver, frost, ash, antique bronze, sage, oxblood, oil slick, black and abyss. But am not sure about the natural leather once though, since I haven’t got one yet.

It’s technically the dye, texture, and the lighting. Sylvari leaves/leaf skin have a shiny, reflective quality to them, light colors like white bounce more light off them than they absorb, and post-processing effects add a lot of extra ambient light that result in areas that already have bright light to create an overexposed effect on reflective things.

Celestial Dye does glow in areas where the lighting level is high, and in snowy zones it makes you (nearly) invisible in certain conditions.

Why is it called Celestial?

ce·les·tial
/s??lesCH?l/Adjective
1.Positioned in or relating to the sky, or outer space as observed in astronomy.
2.Belonging or relating to heaven.

With the rarity and the flippers god knows who can afford it.

For the starters, I’m just gonna say I don’t know anything about 3D and stuff, but I’m interested in how dyes work. So I’m sorry if this post seems like driveling, it’s just all observations described in simplest words I know.

I’m actually curious in this what people perceive as this kind of shine. The brighter the color of the surface and the brighter lights, the stronger the “shine” caused by bloom effect (post processing) is. Celestial dye is very bright, if not the brightest dye (dunno, I saw it only on screens), then sure, bloom will be more visible in most areas.
Well, in that case it’s not exactly “shine” but “glow”. But not glow as in light (like emissivity effect on sylvari, or a lamp, or fire, etc).

My guildmates mention that the color of the “shine” changes with some expensive dyes.
I never noticed dyes affecting specular effect in any way. Specular lighting is always specific for the area (for example login screen, it’s bluish), not for the dye, at least that’s what it looks to me.

Unless I’m mistaking it with some kinda environmental/gloss mapping (since visibility of it is increasing in less light), but still, it’s seem to be specific to area, not the dye. I think. It would be nice to know how are our armors made. Are we changing only the diffuse map, or something else when we apply dyes?

In other words, buying an expensive dye, do we pay for color and rarity, or something else too?

Marge.4035:

For the starters, I’m just gonna say I don’t know anything about 3D and stuff, but I’m interested in how dyes work. So I’m sorry if this post seems like driveling, it’s just all observations described in simplest words I know.

I’m actually curious in this what people perceive as this kind of shine. The brighter the color of the surface and the brighter lights, the stronger the “shine” caused by bloom effect (post processing) is. Celestial dye is very bright, if not the brightest dye (dunno, I saw it only on screens), then sure, bloom will be more visible in most areas.
Well, in that case it’s not exactly “shine” but “glow”. But not glow as in light (like emissivity effect on sylvari, or a lamp, or fire, etc).

My guildmates mention that the color of the “shine” changes with some expensive dyes.
I never noticed dyes affecting specular effect in any way. Specular lighting is always specific for the area (for example login screen, it’s bluish), not for the dye, at least that’s what it looks to me.

Unless I’m mistaking it with some kinda environmental/gloss mapping (since visibility of it is increasing in less light), but still, it’s seem to be specific to area, not the dye. I think. It would be nice to know how are our armors made. Are we changing only the diffuse map, or something else when we apply dyes?

In other words, buying an expensive dye, do we pay for color and rarity, or something else too?

As far as I can tell, the specular map is inherent to the armor item and we are simply changing a base color diffuse.

The same effect also shows up on the Twilight Arbor armor set, or at least the heavy set. I’ve seen people use especially vibrant colors on it and it almost looks like it has a built in incandescence although I imagine it’s some byproduct of the shaders they used to get that waxy reflective quality of leaves.

They also had a weird effect in the first game where Black dye (the most expensive) would be so dark it would completely wash out the normal/bump map and create a sort of black void effect while other armors would get an odd purple color instead.