Dawntrail Graphical Update - Au Ra Feedback

[MiloslavBlazena]

Just wanted to drop my two cents in here, too: don't really like what happened to the fish face option. The mouth was COMPLETELY changed, should be reverted back to the old design. I liked how cute and silly they looked but its like it was erased.

[Et_ela]

Benchmark:

Live:




I'm not a big fan of how the new eyeliner looks cause it results in the eyes looking too big, round, and soft for me. The lips also became thinner for this specific option. I tried looking at the other options but none of them seem to give the same feel that my wol originally had. :'(

(The new scale textures look great!)

[Eraden]

Mao wonderings why new looks making Au Ra looks like suckings on rhubarbs.

[larsa7]

I decided to create an account here for this. I think they changed a lot of my character and while some changes are good, she's a different character in the end.

Old: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q6R...ew?usp=sharing
New: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EkP...ew?usp=sharing

To me, these changes were made:

• Hair looks much better, I prefer new one, fluffier and more alive.
• Horns and the tail both look better, although the colour is grey instead of dirty white which I don't like.
• Scales seem like someone cut them from paper and glued them on her skin. I like that they look more detailed/realistic now, though. However, I wish they'd remained thick. The colour issue is here just like with the horns and the tail.
• Her new visible eye seems to have a sharper corner to it which makes her look more tired/pissed off. I prefer her earlier innocent eyes.
• The mouth seems shortened and gives me this "duckface" impression. No. That's not what I want, ever. It's like she's puckering up a tiny bit. There's an actual emote for that, no need for my character to look like that all the time when idle.
• I've seen this seam on her neck where the scales look worse, it seems unfinished.
• Those limbal rings are different. Like totally different. I loved the fact I could originally make her eyes have this cool blending effect where the yellow eye gets all hazy. It's gone, replaced by brown limbals. If I wanted to only have the brown circles around the eye, I would have chosen them originally.
• Pupils look bigger and their borders are soft, just like with real eyes. Well... I actually prefer more unnatural eyes in video games, so that's not what I want.
• The new nose looks longer to me and its nostrils seem smaller. However, I believe this is only because of lighting change and is no big deal at all.

All of those changes together make her look a few years older. Given that time has passed between ARR and DT, it doesn't feel too bad. However, it feels jarring when so many changes are thrown at your face at once.

I've played with her for years, thousands of hours. While some other WoLs also look very good to my eyes, for me, she's the WoL. I created her with the old graphical limitations and did as good of a job as I've ever done. She's my favourite character I've created since I started creating them in video games in the late 2000s.

Continues in my next message.

[larsa7]

Continues from my first message in this thread.

That's what makes it so sad. If anyone asked me if I wanted to play the older or newer before touching the game, I'd go for the newer character. However, I'd still wonder why I couldn't get the better-looking eyes.

I think the changes remind me of face four, which I would've chosen originally, had I actually wanted to play with it. The face two has always given me this goofy and gentle vibe. Empty sometimes, yes, but it's the face that resembles my actual one the most. The fact that I could somewhat see myself in my character brought me joy.

A benchmark mug shot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dxy...ew?usp=sharing

The colour of the limbal ring looks a bit better here, but that sneer. I don't think the old face would've looked quite like that. Meh. However...

A better benchmark picture: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b2F...ew?usp=sharing

Her eyes look alright in that picture, blending of the limbal ring and the iris seems to happen like it should. It seems that with this new engine, getting a character looking good really depends on the lighting. Before, the characters just either looked good all the time or (rarely) really horrendous with bad lighting conditions.

The goofiest picture of old Haname: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qHA...ew?usp=sharing

There's no way to achieve those sort of funny moments anymore with these new graphics. That makes me sad, I love the empty fish eyes sometimes...

I tried to fix her with the character creator, but the best I could do was to remove the limbals completely, so her yellow eyes looked better.

I may use that free Fantasia. I may not. I don't know if I can get used to playing what's essentially Haname's older sister at this point. She's beautiful, for sure. She's just not Haname.

[GoatOfWar]

Continues from my first message in this thread.

That's what makes it so sad. If anyone asked me if I wanted to play the older or newer before touching the game, I'd go for the newer character. However, I'd still wonder why I couldn't get the better-looking eyes.

I think the changes remind me of face four, which I would've chosen originally, had I actually wanted to play with it. The face two has always given me this goofy and gentle vibe. Empty sometimes, yes, but it's the face that resembles my actual one the most. The fact that I could somewhat see myself in my character brought me joy.

A benchmark mug shot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dxy...ew?usp=sharing

The colour of the limbal ring looks a bit better here, but that sneer. I don't think the old face would've looked quite like that. Meh. However...

A better benchmark picture: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b2F...ew?usp=sharing

Her eyes look alright in that picture, blending of the limbal ring and the iris seems to happen like it should. It seems that with this new engine, getting a character looking good really depends on the lighting. Before, the characters just either looked good all the time or (rarely) really horrendous with bad lighting conditions.

The goofiest picture of old Haname: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qHA...ew?usp=sharing

There's no way to achieve those sort of funny moments anymore with these new graphics. That makes me sad, I love the empty fish eyes sometimes...

I tried to fix her with the character creator, but the best I could do was to remove the limbals completely, so her yellow eyes looked better.

I may use that free Fantasia. I may not. I don't know if I can get used to playing what's essentially Haname's older sister at this point. She's beautiful, for sure. She's just not Haname.

Yeah, i think Face 2 had a charm to it's goofiness that was lost in transition.
And it 100% has to do with the mouth.

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

[CuteBucket]

Okay, I took a bunch of screenshots and tried to make them as identical as possible. This is going to get long and granular, so please bear with me. I play the game currently at gamma 40 and character lighting 20. I put gamma at 40 for the benchmark to match but there's no character lighting option. Bringing the gamma and character lighting even lower and changing the colors of her skin and eyes may be able to alleviate some of my issues with how the colors look. However, there is still a lot wrong that altering colors with a Fantasia won't fix. I'm going to list every change I can see. Let's get started.


Female Au Ra Raen face 3
Things I like:
- Better hair texture
- Better horn and scale texture
- Nose is more defined

Things I don't like:
- No limbal ring glow
- Bigger pupils. This makes her look more tired and lifeless.
- Thinner, lighter colored eyebrows
- Lighter and more ashy skin tone
- Way lighter and less saturated makeup
- Different horn and scale color. The original is a warm bone white color, while the new one is a colder color.
- Scales have a dirty look to them. It doesn't look like natural shading, it looks like gunk caught in them that needs scrubbing out.
- Dull, lifeless hair with no shine
- The lips are totally different. Just a flat :| where she once had a slight:} shape. Thinner, no shine, different color. This is the change I have the biggest problem with.

Different lighting conditions:

The lighting in the Gridania room always looked bad imo, but even with gamma set to what I currently use in game in the benchmark, she still is noticeably lighter. This could be fixed by lowering the gamma further, but that has other game play effects like how well I can see lower light areas on my screen, so I really don't want to lower the gamma too much just to fix her skin color. I may be able to put her one space darker on the skin color menu, but that could be too drastic of a change too. And players already at the darkest end of the menu can't do that.


The dullness of the eyes is very noticeable in this one. She looks like a thrall to a necromancer in the benchmark here.


You can see the eye glow here at least. It actually glows more in the benchmark than the current graphics. Which is fine, but I want some brightness during the day, too.


The shadows on the benchmark look much nicer in terms of graphical fidelity and her skin tone is much closer in direct sunlight. But she's got the dead zombie eyes again and there's still something about the color of the new skin tone that doesn't quite feel right to me. Her hair has also lost a lot of vibrancy and looks flat and has a gray cast even in direct sunlight.

[CuteBucket]

Once again, we get that weird skin tone where it looks like she's almost glowing or has a light source right near her even though her face is in the shade. I know that darker skinned characters had a hard time being seen in some low-light conditions, but this isn't even low light, really, it's just shade on a sunny day, and she still looks like a light is pointed at her. Feels weird and unnatural.


Once more, the shadow rendering here is much better in the benchmark. But how, in direct sun like this, does she still have no light reflections in her eyes? She still looks like a dead fish here, and the lips also look real bad in this light. Direct light and no shine at all.


This one seems to have a greenish cast to the light in the benchmark, but that might be from the surrounding grassy area in the new lighting system, so I won't worry about it too much.


Once more, the skin tone is much closer in direct light, though it seems to have lost some of the reddish-pink undertone she has in the current game. We get the tiniest hint of a light reflection in her eyes, finally, yet she still looks sad and tired next to the original.



Some other angles on the base character creation screen. I wanted to take these to show that the change in the lip shape isn't just a fluke from a certain angle or whatever. Also very noticeable here how much lighter her eyebrows and her eye makeup is. I can't make her eye makeup darker--these are the darkest shades available.

[CuteBucket]

The lips have to be the most egregious and needless change of them all, though. A big reason why I chose face 3 was because of how much I loved the shape of her lips. It's a huge charm point to me. I take screenshots and gpose with her a lot, so of course I notice these things. While the lighting on the glossy lipstick could sometimes interact strangely with the environment, I'd take it over whatever this is.


- Top of lip is pointer in benchmark. Original has more roundness.
- Mouth line is more of a flat :| shape vs the original slight :} shape
- Bottom lip is much smaller and has less volume and fullness along the edges, most notable in the third row. See how before, while at an upward angle looking down, you can see the original lips protruding a bit over the shadow under her lips. This is no longer the case in the benchmark.
- Color has shifted. She is supposed to be wearing dark purple-maroon lipstick. It just looks brown in the benchmark.
- Barely any shine. Looks like she's wearing the uncomfortable matte liquid lipstick I kept trying to wear because it was "cool" in 2018. My lips feel dry and cakey just looking at it.

I can live with the other changes, even if they still irk me somewhat. But not the lips. I draw the line at the lips. I ADORE my character's beautiful lips, and these changes make her look like a different person. They have GOT to fix these lips. Watching her in the benchmark trailer without her signature lip shape was depressing.

[antylamon]

Haven't posted on the forums almost ever, but have to join the dissatisfied people on this, I'm not very pleased with the changes.
Namely, the lips/mouth area (as others mentioned). Face 4 model behaves very weirdly around the mouth no matter the type, and the lips lack any depth or definition, like they're copy-pasted from somewhere else, shape's different too. Dead-looking eyes as well
Hopefully they tweak this eventually, I'm pretty jealous of people whose characters barely changed xD

Left is DT Benchmark and the right is current: