Moon Miqo'te Face 4 feedback

[ArsayNun]

So so happy they finally released a statement of some sort. It's nice to know that our feedback has been received as is being looked into - many thanks to the community management/forum moderation team for their part in this communication chain.

Hopefully, the removal of the lip gap was a product of the "mouth scaling" they mentioned and not an intentional design choice and will be addressed. Same with the keeper fangs. I am /pray -ing that the art and dev team understand the unique charm the face 4 features have in their current live state of the game and make the necessary adjustments in the benchmark (or at the very least, provide a clearer understanding of will be addressed during the time between the benchmark re-release and the dawntrail launch). I don't know if anyone in the JP mega thread has brought up the lip gap, hopefully the feedback from this thread has proven that is an aspect that is loved in our characters. In the case that images prove to be a more useful communication tool to pass around, I've updated my previous mouth comparison diagram with a focus on the lip gap:


I only have good photos for mouth 2 so I encourage others to highlight the gap aspect in their chosen mouths

It's tough to say whether or not they can add more toggles to our characters. Keep in mind, every option you have for your character is a data point which requires server space to be stored and loaded. Considering it seems the dev team is in a never ending struggle for memory (think of how difficult it is for them to add extra slots to literally any storage system in this game) I personally wouldn't keep my hopes up. Not trying to rain on any parades here though! It would be nice if there were more options to be had, if there was more room to control the finer details of our characters. If they could find a way to treat add 4 more mouth shapes to make versions with and without the lip gap and 6 more eye shapes to have versions with and without the heavy lashes without it costing too much memory that would be the perfect choice for everyone. I do respect everyone who likes the new mouths and lashes, but I personally hope things are changed to better align with how our face 4 features look in the game right now. This will be my first time experiencing an expansion on launch and as excited as I am for it, I just know I'll be thinking about how they put my girl through a make up filter the whole time lol

[Gokki]

I saw the official update by Yoshida, and happy to hear they’re monitoring here and taking in our feedback! Thank you very much to them for their hard work and for proving why they’re the best MMO team in the business. They all deserve our love and respect.

I think for the most part this thread will still remain relevant and active feedback since most of the issues discussed in here are with unique details being lost in the remesh process. I had already assumed lighting wasn’t in its final state for the benchmark; I think we already eliminated issues influenced by incorrect lighting from whats being discussed in this thread. I’m not sure what will be happening with mouthes based on what is said in the statement but it’s doubtful that it will include restoring our lip part necessarily.

If they’re still looking for our feedback and making changes, then it’s not too late for us to get our cute noses and lip parts back or added as options. We might still be able to get these new huge lashes and eye make up toned back down. Maybe we can even get our fangs a little longer and brow colour untied to hair colour? If they’re listening then let us face 4 havers make sure we make ourself heard and seen!

Indeed. I had and have faith in SE to address all these things in time. I'm not worry too much about the update to the Benchmark, and would be totally OK with them ignoring the Benchmark completely and pushing the changes onto the 7.0 release.

[juicybug]

The fur is shiny as if it was covered in oil.
IT should have a similar shine to hair at least. perhaps a muted sheen compared to the hair.
Or no shine at all.

[Rueby]

I posted abit about the jawline and I tried taking a different angle to see the lips abit more? I'm really bad at writing/tracing things on photoshop, I haven't drawn in like over a year or so so holding a tablet's pen is abit of a pain for me.

Slider w/ Paintover
Slider w/o Paintover

There's a difference in the upper lip shape (to me), I still see that harsh V shape rather than a slopey line. The lower lip trace is abit? I feel like the really subtle pink/blended look of the original is throwing me off with how defined the shape looks in the current version.

There's also a really SLIGHT angle difference between the shots. The upper lip looks alittle strange to me? plump? It looks like she got upper lip filler to me...I'm struggling to express the words, maybe it's just the light but I feel like the old one was abit thinner.

[Cheapshot]

I posted abit about the jawline and I tried taking a different angle to see the lips abit more? I'm really bad at writing/tracing things on photoshop, I haven't drawn in like over a year or so so holding a tablet's pen is abit of a pain for me.

Slider w/ Paintover
Slider w/o Paintover

There's a difference in the upper lip shape (to me), I still see that harsh V shape rather than a slopey line. The lower lip trace is abit? I feel like the really subtle pink/blended look of the original is throwing me off with how defined the shape looks in the current version.

There's also a really SLIGHT angle difference between the shots. The upper lip looks alittle strange to me? plump? It looks like she got upper lip filler to me...I'm struggling to express the words, maybe it's just the light but I feel like the old one was abit thinner.

Some of those issues may be a result of the improper lighting. It’s also partly because they increased the polycount of the face to support a more robust animation rig and that really softened all the features and removed their definition. When modelling you have to manually restore that definition usually but they didn’t in our case. We’ll have to see how things look once they update the benchmark with fixed lighting, but the stuff with actual mesh differences might not be addressed.

We might see some improvements to our mouthes when they fix issues with scaling that they mentioned too. I suspect they may also give our fangs more length since that’s been a high vis concern. We probably wont see our lip gap again from that though, or have our noses un-straightened unless we make noise about it. I also don’t know why they made our lashes and brows so different since the new ones aren’t higher resolution? Very confused about that. We’ll hopefully get their attention on those issues as well. Our face is in the minority so it will be hard to be heard but keep at it.

[Cheapshot]

We can only speculate about what a lot of what was said in Director Yoshida’s statement is referring to. After giving it some thought though, I don’t think “An issue with uncorrected scaling for the mouth of certain playable races.” was referring to the mesh itself of the mouthes. I think it likely refers to the scaling of the animations. For instance, how far vertices are pulled when a character laughs or smiles. The same animations have to be scaled differently for each race and face, which is all a bunch of math really. Incorrect scaling means the geometry might be pulled too far or not far enough or in the wrong direction. Mouthes might open way too wide or look unnatural and strange outside of their neutral position. We did see that happening in the benchmark, most noticeably on the boat at the start, and in the viper attack freeze frame later on. Actual changes to the mouth shapes might not necessarily happen.

[Rueby]

Snip

Huh this is actually insightful! I do admit that I actually don't have experience with 3D modeling, everytime I booted blender up and tried my brain imploded. I only have basic knowledge of it so I don't know the process when it involves things like animation rigs etc.

I find it really strange too, there's some things that confuse me like the nose bump on F1 that wasn't even there. I thought mine vanishing might be some polygon count limitation..Like for example hypothetically they want to limit something to 200 polygons across all faces(this is a random number) so they can't create more? I don't even know if that's what happened or if something like that can even happen?

[Gokki]

We can only speculate about what a lot of what was said in Director Yoshida’s statement is referring to. After giving it some thought though, I don’t think “An issue with uncorrected scaling for the mouth of certain playable races.” was referring to the mesh itself of the mouthes. I think it likely refers to the scaling of the animations. For instance, how far vertices are pulled when a character laughs or smiles. The same animations have to be scaled differently for each race and face, which is all a bunch of math really. Incorrect scaling means the geometry might be pulled too far or not far enough or in the wrong direction. Mouthes might open way too wide or look unnatural and strange outside of their neutral position. We did see that happening in the benchmark, most noticeably on the boat at the start, and in the viper attack freeze frame later on. Actual changes to the mouth shapes might not necessarily happen.

If that's the case, my character's mouth is definitely overstretched in this example, way too wide:



There's other instances but this is the most obvious to me.

[Rueby]

We can only speculate about what a lot of what was said in Director Yoshida’s statement is referring to. After giving it some thought though, I don’t think “An issue with uncorrected scaling for the mouth of certain playable races.” was referring to the mesh itself of the mouthes. I think it likely refers to the scaling of the animations. For instance, how far vertices are pulled when a character laughs or smiles. The same animations have to be scaled differently for each race and face, which is all a bunch of math really. Incorrect scaling means the geometry might be pulled too far or not far enough or in the wrong direction. Mouthes might open way too wide or look unnatural and strange outside of their neutral position. We did see that happening in the benchmark, most noticeably on the boat at the start, and in the viper attack freeze frame later on. Actual changes to the mouth shapes might not necessarily happen.

Yeah...that could be it too. Honestly I think the damage control PR statement Yoshi P made felt very vague but I guess we'll have to wait and see. It's good that at least they noticed both EN and JP forums are on fire and ours more so than JP... (or maybe they noticed the JP side and didn't notice ours on fire)

[Cheapshot]

Huh this is actually insightful! I do admit that I actually don't have experience with 3D modeling, everytime I booted blender up and tried my brain imploded. I only have basic knowledge of it so I don't know the process when it involves things like animation rigs etc.

I find it really strange too, there's some things that confuse me like the nose bump on F1 that wasn't even there. I thought mine vanishing might be some polygon count limitation..Like for example hypothetically they want to limit something to 200 polygons across all faces(this is a random number) so they can't create more? I don't even know if that's what happened or if something like that can even happen?

I’m by no means an expert but I do have 3D modelling experience and this makes the most sense to me. I saw youtubers covering this, speculating that it was referring to our fangs but I think my guess is much more likely.

They are still working within the confines of a very old engine so they likely have set a complexity budget. The increase in vertices is mainly focused around points of articulation. For Miqo’te, neck up, I think it’s about one additional fold point in the ears and the rest focused around the face.

Setting a locked amount of vertices for every face makes a ton of sense because it makes it across the board easier to take one animation and apply it to every character. If you know every mouth uses x number of vertices, you don’t have to adjust the animation to drag more or less of them.

“Easier”, but it’s still an incredible amount of work. Even if the amount if vertices is uniform, the scale of each race and face is different and those vertices are in different places on each face. You have to make adjustments for each different mouth option on each different face for example, or stuff looks real wacky. Those adjustments weren’t all correct so stuff indeed looked real wacky.

Again, just my speculation, but I would bet money I don’t have that this is what that referred to.

Edit: there are some things that don’t make sense to me still though, like the eyelashes and brows. They look entirely new but aren’t any higher resolution. I don’t know if that’s part of what he referred to when he said “An issue with unimplemented high-resolution textures, including those for certain playable races.” I noticed the ear fur seemed low resolution, and the eye texture when looking closer was actually blurrier than the one in the game currently so those ones probably were in error? Curious to see what ends up changing.