When playing with the character creator, don't forget to change the pose and outfits
A lot of the complaints I've seen regarding lighting, shadows, skin tones, and textures are taking screenshots to compare apples to apples with the old engine and new engine using a FACE ON view in one of the outside zones.
But the fact is that our characters don't look like the face on mug shots we see in our avatar images here in the official forums when we're actively playing in the game, unless we failed to update the portrait and we got stuck with the "basic" ones loading into a duty. ("Noooooo, my portrait," I cry, having upgraded a ring without reapplying the linked glamour plate...)
Anyway, what I found is that when I change over to the aetherial sea background and start spinning it, my lip shine and hair shine is suddenly back. Even the eye shine is there, depending on the angle. (I still looked dead eye when my character was face down laughing, but weirdly only on my Au Ra - I'm thinking there's an actual problem on the Au Ra eye shines that hopefully gets addressed.)
If I change from Standing pose over to Unique pose in one of the outside zones in the main character creator, then the fluid motion and movement makes the character suddenly look a lot more familiar again.
And if I put on one of the custom outfits and run the benchmark, then my characters all look more or less the same as always - zoomed in to extreme levels there's noticeable differences, but zoomed out the overall sense of self is maintained.
I couldn't get Grandma here to "look right" because she never wears starter Roe clothes! but I slapped her in a Maelstrom uniform, spun her around in aetherial sea lighting, and... yeah, she's right. That's her. That's my Grandma.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/8c6cd535...9447cc58e9.pnj
