Dawntrail Graphical Update - Au Ra Feedback

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Originally Posted by yoyonoya

I posted this in the general before/after thread but I'll post here as well since it's specific to Au Ra.

https://i.imgur.com/gVEAuIY.png

I'm so devastated with how my girl looks. Her previous resting expression looked mildly pleased, but now because of changes to the shadows it looks like her entire face has been pulled taut? She looks like she hasn't slept in weeks. The top/bottom eyeliner in the Other Features section used to be an opaque color that gave the impression of a larger lined eye, but now it blends into the skin and makes it look like raccoon eyeshadow instead.

I've tried editing so many things in the character creator but there's no way to make her look like she did before... I really hope they fix this.

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Your new Au ra looks baked.
Whatever she smoked this morning, i want to have too.

Not happy with my Au Ra either.

Current:
https://i.imgur.com/ebo0456.png

Benchmark:
https://i.imgur.com/g1AgXUd.png


She has lost much of the charm that made her her. She now looks much older than she did for some reason, and the new shadowing on her face doesn't contrast well with the new scale colour. Basically, she looks older, more mature, and more depressed, which isn't what I want.

To me, she looks so much different now! I was expecting the graphical update to just improve how our characters were before, not completely change them.

Really not ok with how they changed the eyebrows/lip shape/lip shine. Everything else I can deal with but I want my girl's wide mouth back.

https://i.imgur.com/PhpZ81n.png
https://i.imgur.com/TYwI3I6.png

One thing I will say is that I think they really did a good job responding to feedback regarding the limbal rings. They retained the glow while making them blend with the rest of the eye better. I think if that's how they respond to feedback then I'm hopeful giving them feedback on other stuff will help.

https://i.imgur.com/EilgqMu.png

There are things that I like such as the details on the horns and scales. However, the parts that immediately look off putting to me are the lips and eyes.

Female Au Ra doesn't have too much shading/shadows on the face in general, but

https://i.imgur.com/hOCvTqE.png

The lack of shadow around the mouth makes it seem really flat?
Making the lips have more of a matte look instead of a gloss changes the color significantly. The same color is on both of the models, but in this image it doesn't look that way.

https://i.imgur.com/KFdyhEj.png

As for the eyes, the pupils seem to have been made slightly larger.
It honestly gives too much of the "dead stare" that was jokingly mentioned by Yoshi-P, especially when looking at the model from a distance.

Honestly, I don't fully hate the changes, but I'm one of the ones that didn't get effected that much compared to others. I can still somewhat see my character when they emote, but I won't lie, it is a bit off putting.

(EDIT - Image links broke. Used Imgur instead.)

Posted this in the WoL comparison, but decided to throw it in here as well, along with few extras. Do want to point out, the quality of the textures and materials are good indeed, so good job on that, but...

This just ain't my Au Ra, it's some impostor. Give me back my Xena the Warrior Princess and take this Garnet the sheltered princess back xD (or put as a new face preset I suppose)

Current:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...bded15325d390&
Benchmark:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...a7b654aad846d&

Here's an imgur album for shots from each of the zones in the character creator (for some reason imgur thinks it's adultery content, apparently my character too sexy for it xD): https://imgur.com/a/Xk0oU14

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Originally Posted by Nebty

One thing I will say is that I think they really did a good job responding to feedback regarding the limbal rings. They retained the glow while making them blend with the rest of the eye better. I think if that's how they respond to feedback then I'm hopeful giving them feedback on other stuff will help.

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Agreed with this fullheartedly.

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Originally Posted by Aadrian1234

Female Au Ra, Face type 4, Mouth type 1, has noticeably different lips and changes how my character looks quite a bit. I'm not a big fan of this, and at the very least, I would like there to be an option to have the exact same lip shape and fullness as the current live game.

First is 6.58, second is the Dawntrail Benchmark
https://i.imgur.com/BIryxzw.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/OhBsl2C.jpg

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The more I've looked around, the more it feels like female Au Ra facial features have been homogenized a bit, more than just mouths. Stern looks are much more muted, rougher and sharper features feel smoothed down, and so-on. One of the reasons I made my character how she is, was that I could make her look more stern, and less soft and dainty, which is changed in the Benchmark to make those kinds of faces look much softer and not as sharp than before.

Even more comparisons

Live game:
https://i.imgur.com/MNeR72D.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/p3Y01FU.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/7YGjEMF.png

Benchmark:
https://i.imgur.com/Pjwh7BZ.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/fc031Mi.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/4iybZRV.jpg

Also a picture from the opening boat sequence:
https://i.imgur.com/GNfpa8j.jpeg

Compared with my partner's Face 2 female Au Ra, which she's pretty happy about:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...206&height=509

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Your new Au ra looks baked.
Whatever she smoked this morning, i want to have too.

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That was exactly my thought when I first saw her too :')))
I just want her to look normal!

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Originally Posted by yoyonoya

That was exactly my thought when I first saw her too :')))
I just want her to look normal!

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If it makes you feel any better, my character looks completely different too and i hate it.
The eyes, mouth and nose got completely changed and it doesn't look like my character anymore.

https://imgur.com/a/6gAKOP7

She's become unrecognisable.
Not sure if i want to play the game if i can't even play as the character i always played as.

I was disappointed when I first loaded up my character. It was mainly the limbal rings. I much prefer them bright and glowy, but I remember they mentioned at Japan Fanfest there would be the option for both, so I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt there, assuming the option just hasn't been implemented yet. Imagine my surprise when I took screenshots to compare and contrast:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/d585e94d...6c0edf16f5.png

It isn't just the limbal rings that have changed- the shape of her eyes is different! It's a subtle change, but it makes a big difference. She doesn't even look like the same character anymore. I'm very unhappy.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

If it makes you feel any better, my character looks completely different too and i hate it.
The eyes, mouth and nose got completely changed and it doesn't look like my character anymore.

https://imgur.com/a/6gAKOP7

She's become unrecognisable.
Not sure if i want to play the game if i can't even play as the character i always played as.

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I find the new one better personally, but as with my own issue, this shouldn't replace the existing one, it should be added as a new face preset. No one should lose the one they liked and right now, it seems like nearly every fem Au Ra is in that situation, we no longer have what we liked about our characters.

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Originally Posted by Azalea_Forest

I was disappointed when I first loaded up my character. It was mainly the limbal rings. I much prefer them bright and glowy, but I remember they mentioned at Japan Fanfest there would be the option for both, so I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt there, assuming the option just hasn't been implemented yet. Imagine my surprise when I took screenshots to compare and contrast:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/d585e94d...6c0edf16f5.png

It isn't just the limbal rings that have changed- the shape of her eyes is different! It's a subtle change, but it makes a big difference. She doesn't even look like the same character anymore. I'm very unhappy.

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It's not subtle, the mouth looks fucking horrible, the eyes are dim and the nose loks wider.

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Originally Posted by Ryu_Makkuro

I find the new one better personally, but as with my own issue, this shouldn't replace the existing one, it should be added as a new face preset. No one should lose the one they liked and right now, it seems like nearly every fem Au Ra is in that situation, we no longer have what we liked about our characters.

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I don't really care whatever other people like more, that's just not my character anymore.

Note about the glowy Limbal Rings, they glow much more in the benchmark in lighter area's, less so in darker. So if switch to the other area's or run the benchmark itself, you'll notice they'll be much closer to the old versions. It's not ideal by any means, but I think it's a pretty good middle ground overall.

The game's always had a rough time with dark skin, but this is frankly upsetting wrt Xaela.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/62b053d4...8ed86ef5d9.pnj

In limsa, she looks green. There's parts around the scales that have light pixels, her undertone is lifeless and just looks bad, there's automatic eyeshadow and what looks like lipgloss when I don't use either of those, and it's just...it's really disappointing?? I was hoping the dark skin would look good for once, and now here we are. Also she looks lighter than what I have in my pfp...just c'mon.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...166e1908f2fd8&https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...4664326295976&
My lizard looks SO strange in the benchmark. Her mouth looks completely different.

Good to see the good old problem of the extra scales standing out is still there.
The literal 1 thing I wanted them to fix.
https://i.imgur.com/qOaWVGh.png

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

It's not subtle, the mouth looks fucking horrible, the eyes are dim and the nose loks wider.

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The nose looks the same to me, I just think the lighting is affecting the way it looks. I had to look through the thread a bit to get a feel with what was wrong with the mouth- I think it's a lot less obvious on my girl, but the creases along the sides of the lips have been toned down significantly. To my eyes, it doesn't look like the shape of the lips themselves have changed, but those creases did a lot to make the mouth look wider. Without them it just looks a bit off. I don't know how to feel about all that- I was mainly focused on my poor girl's eyes.

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Originally Posted by Azalea_Forest

The nose looks the same to me, I just think the lighting is affecting the way it looks. I had to look through the thread a bit to get a feel with what was wrong with the mouth- I think it's a lot less obvious on my girl, but the creases along the sides of the lips have been toned down significantly. To my eyes, it doesn't look like the shape of the lips themselves have changed, but those creases did a lot to make the mouth look wider. Without them it just looks a bit off. I don't know how to feel about all that- I was mainly focused on my poor girl's eyes.

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We have the same issues, Au ra face 2, same colored eyes and mouth type.
My character looks unrecognisable, and idk about you but looking at this makes me not want to play DT.

I'm very upset with this... mainly with the eyes and lips.

I don't like the dilated pupils at all. The limbals not being on the very outer edge makes the irises look smaller as well.

The lips have lost all their definition and look a bit thinner. Lip shine should be added back, at least as a toggle.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLHshpKW...pg&name=mediumhttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLHsho_W...pg&name=medium

Au Ra face 2 also looks drastically different. It's not the lighting. The features themselves changed and not in a subtle manner, especially the lips. It doesn't look good.

I'll have to use the free fantasia SE will give us.

https://i.imgur.com/3PwwcEl.png

Geez, her lips look completely different. I'm not sure why they drastically changed so many of the lip shapes. A bunch of Au Ra lip options look strange and puckered.

https://sun9-80.userapi.com/impg/nFc...64b&type=album
https://sun9-80.userapi.com/impg/ZIS...a06&type=album

He just looks plastic tbh

And those are ugly, Like I don't want this bad of jpeg on my body come on what are those
https://sun9-55.userapi.com/impg/wGt...978&type=album

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Originally Posted by AvaloniaFallen

Geez, her lips look completely different. I'm not sure why they drastically changed so many of the lip shapes. A bunch of Au Ra lip options look strange and puckered.

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Almost feels like they mixed up the lip options somewhere in development.

God, for the most part I've been kind of chill with most of the changes, barring a few exceptions (miqote fangs, roe nose smudge, viera lips, etc) but i can't sugar coat it, au ra kind of got slaughtered. :x

The eyes are wrong, the limbal rings are wrong, the lips are freaking criminal, the scales have artifacting, and the neck seam is still there???! Oof.

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Originally Posted by Roda

God, for the most part I've been kind of chill with most of the changes, barring a few exceptions (miqote fangs, roe nose smudge, viera lips, etc) but i can't sugar coat it, au ra kind of got slaughtered. :x

The eyes are wrong, the limbal rings are wrong, the lips are freaking criminal, the scales have artifacting, and the neck seam is still there???! Oof.

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My character looks more like a distant cousin of my character than my actual character in DT.
The eyes, lips and nose MUST be addressed.

Face 1 and 4 male Au Ra look way better than before.

I have two female au ras, one face 1, one face 2.

I'm pretty happy with how face 2 looks now - but I would perhaps enjoy it even more if the mouth was a bit wider. Everything else is perfect.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...742&height=662

My face 1 au ra I'm also quite happy with, but I feel that the face paint would need to get some editing. It feels too fuzzy and not on par with other high definition textures we've received. The face paint eyebrows also don't align with the regular eyebrows.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...11eddf69c990e&

I have a lot of friends whose female au ra characters have face 4, and they're dissatisfied with how softened the features of their characters are. I really hope SE will return the "edge" to face 4 and sharp corners of the eyes it had, because I think the fierce look was what really made face 4 unique.

I also hope that the visual bugs regarding characters with darker skin colors will be fixed.

I think, overall, the Gridanian preview zone has issues with its lighting - characters there look pretty flat. My face 2 character immediately lost all of the depth and nuance her face had when I switched the preview to this zone.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...649&height=662

oooh, my turn to butt in!
like everyone else, the artifacting is really atrocious on darker skin tones. in fact, the quality of the scales on the body are just... really out of place? especially in comparison to the face/horns:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...823&height=450
https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...905&height=662

I remember them saying during the live, that they weren't going to change any models or stuff but they have definitely changed lip and nose models. a lot of the lips have lost that little dip in the middle, and are a completely straight line.
my partner's Raen is definitely suffering from it.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...08af0b52620e6&
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...ce0b12412e740&
on lower graphics settings, too, the skin texture kinda looks like hotpressed water color paper

also this is me personally, but i feel like they've sucked a lot of the red undertones out of the skintones, it feels horrific in the chara creator

i really like some of the changes, and i really want to like this update overall! i just dont like that theyre changing so much when they said it'd just be a texture/shader update. i'd like my characters to be recognizable from their 6.5x state to 7.x

I feel I must say something too, registered just for this, because I can't keep silent about this, they absolutely murdered my character!

Original
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...29953b4277718&
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...342fdc61ff9ba&

Benchmark
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...1fd3e4af43082&
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...51f01b84dd1aa&

Originally my character looked curious and intelligent, like "ooh, what is that shiny thing!", but in the benchmark she's all dull and gloomy looking, like "I guess Meteion was right, life sucks and I'm out of coffee", it is not my character!
Also, I know a lot of people has been praising it, but I absolutely dislike the new Raen scales! The Xaela ones look good, but the Raen ones, especially around the neck look like as if they grew under the skin like some sort of skin disease, the original ones have a more natural color at the edges that gives the scales the feel that they grew out of the skin, part of it, they protrude. It's almost feels like as if they by accident flipped the normal map of the scale texture. And I really don't like how it's more white/grey colored, the white highlights look way over done, the more bronze/gold feel of the scales are gone. Why can't we choose the color of the scales anyways? Why only two presets?

Lip changes are so bad.

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Originally Posted by Yukimin

Lip changes are so bad.

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Agreed, all lips are ugly now.

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Originally Posted by wyrmonstring

also this is me personally, but i feel like they've sucked a lot of the red undertones out of the skintones, it feels horrific in the chara creator

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I am 99% sure this is due to the subsurface scattering being implemented, which relies on the lighting to provide that "red undertone" to the skin. However since the character creator seems to have really bad lighting, the subsurface scattering can't do its job properly, and thus lacking in those red undertones. Considering that in the benchmark itself it looks much better, I'd say this is indeed the case.

Bring out the usual meme excuses of "spaghetti code", "indie dev team", etc. xD

My one complaint is that I wish my character's mouth had a more similar shape to what it had before. It looks too narrow now.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...8bc6fe4abd392&

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...51e15e594ce79&

I feel my main issue with the scales for Au Ra are the pixly bits in the face and that the scale over the nose bridge looks like it has lost pieces/clips into the skin.
A smaller issue is that the red highlights for Xaela horns have become almost... nonexistent. While on Raen horns the black highlights look a lot better.

Overall issue I see with many races is the skin texture looking rather cakey, especially on pale skin tones as well as flat lips in terms of shading.

Nitpicky issue is that while I love the glow of the limbal rings, it feels like they are bigger than what they used to be- but I could get used to that!

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Agreed, all lips are ugly now.

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idek what you mean, the lips are fine + I'm glad they finally gave us some larger lip options. finally, i no longer look like im holding a frog in my mouth.

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Originally Posted by MediocreIndigo

My one complaint is that I wish my character's mouth had a more similar shape to what it had before. It looks too narrow now.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...8bc6fe4abd392&

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I have a similar character and I agree, it seems like the mouth is more narrow horizontally.

And lip color is too flat, like others have said.

The hair, skin and scales are a nice improvement, especially in daylight.

I like a lot of the changes to M Au Ra! I'm a face 1 player, and the restructure of the mouth looks awesome. I like the new scale textures and glossier specularity. My only real complaints are, as others have stated, the intensity of the pore textures, and the current state of the eyes.

The pores are really visible and jarring on pale skin tones.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/79aa7d48...615e7ea6ed.pnj

Below are 7.0 Benchmark (left) and 6.0 Benchmark (right). The limbal rings now emit light, which is cool, but they're currently very thick. In combination with a larger pupil, the eye color itself get lost. The increased shading and depth on the iris looks very nice without the limbal ring, but makes the eye color indistinguishable with it.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/ee7b70df...d3ddd4fd9d.pnj

I made a quick paintover with a smaller iris and thinner limbal ring, as well as a bigger and brighter catchlight for comparison. It may not be accurate to the lighting, but the older eyes looked much more alive with a more cartoonish approach to this.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/872eddcd...fc4ed8d470.pnj

That said, I think this is on the right track! Attempting to make the lighting flattering for all skin types is a monumental challenge and one that deserves praise for making the effort to tackle.

I've not ever used the forums before but am so distraught I don't know what else to do. My character looks so different, his eyes look mean now and there's no life in them anymore. They're dull. And the lips, I was able to mostly fix the color by swapping to the lighter lip color, but they're matte now instead of glossy. And like a lot of other people's WoL's his skin is noticeably lighter than before, though I struggled to show it in the character creator without getting shadows across his face.

My character is as kind-looking as I was able to make him while keeping a thin face, his personality is optimistic, gentle, and friendly. His face doesn't reflect that at all anymore.

He feels like looking at a completely different person, nothing like how I wanted him to be when I made him. I'm devastated.

https://imgur.com/a/bh1z9jAhttps://imgur.com/a/bh1z9jA
I hope the picture uploads correctly, I'm sorry if it doesn't. :(

https://i.imgur.com/KNOzCr9.png
https://i.imgur.com/tkgUywE.png
https://i.imgur.com/iETDvIy.png

Top is the game as it is, bottom two of course are the benchmarks. This doesn't look like my character at all, her face is too round, her mouth is too pouty, and why on earth did they give her dimples? She's supposed to be tough, she's a reaper and a dark knight, and I designed her accordingly back in HW cause I knew I wanted her to look like a tougher character than I could achieve with the other face shapes. Now I showed the new her to my husband and he said she looks like she's holding air in her cheeks constantly. :| And I tried all the other mouths and jaws and nothing makes it better, just bigger or smaller but still overly round, puffy, and with pouty lips and dimples.

I like the Au ra I think the scales are nicer but my gripe is the lack of colour on mouths. I like a little bit of shine on them, but now its just flat and seems to be beige/brown not nice soft pink/red.