Moon Miqo'te Face 4 feedback

[Rueby]

Snip

Really? Do you have links to said youtube videos? I'd love to see them.

I really believe I saw them talk about that in a LL but I don't remember which exactly because I lost interest and alt tabbed and I don't wish to perpetuate misinformation, I've been trying to look for it in the FFXIV Discord but I've scrolled up awhile and didn't see any screenshots with translations. It might've been the LL before the last one? I didn't really understand it and it felt like technical stuff I didn't care much for. I don't think I gaslit myself into something that I have so little knowledge about....but yeah.

I honestly don't have enough knowledge to speculate about it but you might be onto something since it does make sense (to me) as someone who has no knowledge about such things. It'd make sense in a way they want to make one thing fixed (non variable) to make things easier/more manageable?

Someone in the Optional thread mentioned an interesting albeit tinfoily hat thing that the thick lashes might be some error from a race (I don't remember? was it F Highlander?) that had eyelash toggle. But I don't think it makes much sense since the eyelashes feel shaped to our eyes...?

Maybe speculation or tinfoil on my end, but maybe it could be unfinished stuff which would like line up with "An issue with unimplemented high-resolution textures, including those for certain playable races." Maybe some things were patched together for the Benchmark or something...I don't know since I don't know the workflow/technicality in regards to textures, do they make precursory low res textures and then high res counterparts?

If for example you try the new hairstyle added in DT you can see how high quality and detailed it is, some hair sections flow in the wind and it looks really polished- it has horrible/almost no highlights tho! While the old hair feels as if someone took the textures and hit sharpen 20 times in photoshop. I wouldn't call it placeholders but more like 'work on it later' or 'work in progress' 'but here's this for now'?

So, it also makes me curious as to how things will look in the final version or down the line. To me I feel the Benchmark is alittle rushed but I think they pushed it out anyway for people to see if their PC can actually run the game or not.

[Rueby]

Snipped from another thread

I see allot of my issues were already talked about being adjusted, the eyes being dull and lifeless losing that charming almost anime feel we have now. so I wont go into those. The fangs on moon miqote need to be brought back, i know this has been said before so ill leave that as is.

My main other concern with my character is they have made her eyelashes feel too long and given her a kind of doll like appearance that is not me or my character at all, I prefer my eye shape to stay the same, i know why they did it to fix the odd skin around the inside upper part of the eyes on my chosen face but, longer lashes isnt the right solution. My character is not a doll of a girl. Ill show pictures of before and after to show this.







As you can see the eye lashes are way to long, please find a way to match the old more. I do not want to be so dolled up.

[Cheapshot]

Really? Do you have links to said youtube videos? I'd love to see them.

I really believe I saw them talk about that in a LL but I don't remember which exactly because I lost interest and alt tabbed and I don't wish to perpetuate misinformation, I've been trying to look for it in the FFXIV Discord but I've scrolled up awhile and didn't see any screenshots with translations. It might've been the LL before the last one? I didn't really understand it and it felt like technical stuff I didn't care much for. I don't think I gaslit myself into something that I have so little knowledge about....but yeah.

I honestly don't have enough knowledge to speculate about it but you might be onto something since it does make sense (to me) as someone who has no knowledge about such things. It'd make sense in a way they want to make one thing fixed (non variable) to make things easier/more manageable?

Someone in the Optional thread mentioned an interesting albeit tinfoily hat thing that the thick lashes might be some error from a race (I don't remember? was it F Highlander?) that had eyelash toggle. But I don't think it makes much sense since the eyelashes feel shaped to our eyes...?

Maybe speculation or tinfoil on my end, but maybe it could be unfinished stuff which would like line up with "An issue with unimplemented high-resolution textures, including those for certain playable races." Maybe some things were patched together for the Benchmark or something...I don't know since I don't know the workflow/technicality in regards to textures, do they make precursory low res textures and then high res counterparts?

[snip]

They were just reading the public statement we got recently and trying to make educated guesses. They weren’t going off anything else really. Fairly sure they’re wrong anyway so no real point in linking.

As for the lashes, I don’t think its an accident or anything. I think they were trying to cover the area between the eyeball and the top of the eye.



And to be fair to them, I’m not fully sure why that was the way it was either. You dont normally see that much, uh, flesh? Between the eyeball and the upper eyelid. So they likely viewed it as a mistake, but how do you fix it without changing the shape of the eye? I expect changing the curve of the lash to hug the eyeball way too close was their solution since they couldn’t spend the polys to create a lid edge. Then they made them really long and uniform and went heavy on the mascara to just hide the area.

I don't necessarily know what the proper solution to that is, although I would prefer the eye to continue to look a bit unusual than have these huge false lashes that massively change the feel of the face. I got used to the way the eyes look.

Also again this is just educated speculation based on experience.

[Moonsprite]

They were just reading the public statement we got recently and trying to make educated guesses. They weren’t going off anything else really. Fairly sure they’re wrong anyway so no real point in linking.

As for the lashes, I don’t think its an accident or anything. I think they were trying to cover the area between the eyeball and the top of the eye.



And to be fair to them, I’m not fully sure why that was the way it was either. You dont normally see that much, uh, flesh? Between the eyeball and the upper eyelid. So they likely viewed it as a mistake, but how do you fix it without changing the shape of the eye? I expect changing the curve of the lash to hug the eyeball way too close was their solution since they couldn’t spend the polys to create a lid edge. Then they made them really long and uniform and went heavy on the mascara to just hide the area.

I don't necessarily know what the proper solution to that is, although I would prefer the eye to continue to look a bit unusual than have these huge false lashes that massively change the feel of the face. I got used to the way the eyes look.

Also again this is just educated speculation based on experience.

I bet you guessed right. I think it looks better covered up with lashes though. If they fixed it to where it was just the whites of the eyes instead I think it would change the shape of the eye even more. I personally like the bigger lashes and I hope they make them optional so I can use them and people who don’t like it, don’t have to use them. I don’t think the benchmark remake is going to change the lashes unless they purposefully decide to revert the change. It doesn’t look like a shadow problem to me either.

[Cheapshot]

I bet you guessed right. I think it looks better covered up with lashes though. If they fixed it to where it was just the whites of the eyes instead I think it would change the shape of the eye even more. I personally like the bigger lashes and I hope they make them optional so I can use them and people who don’t like it, don’t have to use them. I don’t think the benchmark remake is going to change the lashes unless they purposefully decide to revert the change. It doesn’t look like a shadow problem to me either.

Edit: I wanted to see why they made the lashes so big and I suspected maybe it was hiding something that didn’t look good. Decided to try and grab a screenshot where my character closes their eyes.. They seem to have stretched the lid down to the white and extended the lashes up to cover the area...

It's uh… that’s pretty bad...

[Rueby]

Edit: I wanted to see why they made the lashes so big and I suspected maybe it was hiding something that didn’t look good. Decided to try and grab a screenshot where my character closes their eyes.. They seem to have stretched the lid down to the white and extended the lashes up to cover the area...
It's uh… that’s pretty bad...

I'm honestly not understanding what I'm looking at, or rather not really sure what they'd want to hide? Do you mean that really ugly black artifacting smear? Or do you mean that upper waterline that's visible?

[Cheapshot]

I'm honestly not understanding what I'm looking at, or rather not really sure what they'd want to hide? Do you mean that really ugly black artifacting smear? Or do you mean that upper waterline that's visible?

Those creases/streaks coming up from the base of the lash. I have two guesses as to what those are but I’m not sure which it is. It may even be both or neither. It would be hard to know for sure without getting hands on with the games files which I don’t have access to. Because of that, take this all with a grain of salt please, it’s just speculation. I absolutely don’t want to give the impression I know exactly what is going on with absolute certainty. Pointing out that something looks visually wrong is the beginning and end of what I’m qualified to do.

So with that said, time for wild speculation. One guess is problems with the mesh because faces were stretched down to cover where the large upper waterline used to be instead of adding additional faces. They might have had to do it that way because of poly budget or some kind of mesh guideline. It’s probably too few polys trying to cover too curved/delicate an area and we can see sorta, edges where there shouldn’t be edges.


If those lines aren’t caused by what I just said, they could also be caused by the eyelash texture bleeding up onto the eyelid. We can see this happening if we look at the two outside corners of the eyes. You can see what looks like eyelash texture has accidentally ended up on the skin.

The black smudginess running up the eyelid is also probably lash texture bleed getting stretched out when the mesh deforms to blink. The vertical streaks could also be from that. Tough to say. I wish I could free cam around to study it better.

I don’t know if the lashes were made longer to obscure that area, or if it’s just a coincidence and they were just trying to make the eyes look more feminine with big fuller lashes. Either way, there’s some problems there that I hope get noticed and fixed.

[Rueby]

Snip

Thank you so much for the disclaimer honestly! I feel like I learn alot from our interactions and I really appreciate your time in demonstrating/explaining things for me!

I thought these lines were basically a symptom of low quality face texture? Like how we can see artifacting on some face models? I don't know much about 3D modeling so what you're saying is registering as 'yeah that could make sense'. Maybe it's a combination of low quality texture + mesh limitation = smudgy mess? It weirdly looks to me more like they tried to create a 'smokey eye' look and kinda failed.

I thought the eyelash texture is just what is on the uhh...3D bit of the lashes? I never thought it could bleed into the face/eyelid as well! That's really interesting if that's the case and I wonder if there's a fix for that or if it falls into some kind of technical limitation?

[Cheapshot]

Thank you so much for the disclaimer honestly! I feel like I learn alot from our interactions and I really appreciate your time in demonstrating/explaining things for me!

I thought these lines were basically a symptom of low quality face texture? Like how we can see artifacting on some face models? I don't know much about 3D modeling so what you're saying is registering as 'yeah that could make sense'. Maybe it's a combination of low quality texture + mesh limitation = smudgy mess? It weirdly looks to me more like they tried to create a 'smokey eye' look and kinda failed.

I thought the eyelash texture is just what is on the uhh...3D bit of the lashes? I never thought it could bleed into the face/eyelid as well! That's really interesting if that's the case and I wonder if there's a fix for that or if it falls into some kind of technical limitation?

The texture bleed makes a lot more sense when you see a texture map yourself. You basically take the 3d model and unfold it until it's flat, and then you "map" that to a flat image with all your characters body textures on it. Usually for a lot of reasons you try to put as much as you can of one model on the same image. The map basically shows where the textures should be applied to the model. So the lashes and face often draw their textures from the same image (and I'm 99% sure they do in this games case as well).

Also I don't know if this is true but I read that FFXIV has moved into using the same basemesh for every races head, and are using shapekeys to recreate the facial features (data which can be adjusted that says how to arrange the shape of everything). If that's true it confirms that they have a strict set of vertices to arrange and that's why the upper lid was stretched down instead of adding more geometry. Those lines might be because the lid was stretched down and those faces are having to work too hard lol. It could also be lines from the lash texture. It doesn't matter much whatever is causing it. Overall I hope the area gets improved and we get de-makuped.

Them using shapekeys (if it's true that they are) has lots of upsides though! It may be easier to have our features fixed in the short term, and in the long term it means they might be able to improve the CC to add actual facial sliders for features down the line. That would be incredible.

[celestiyall]

Your eyelid post gave me an aha moment. I was wondering why something on my face (besides the obvious ones) just didn't look right and pinpointed it to my facepaint, which at first I was like, is it sitting too far down? Because the face stripes don't align against it the same way anymore. And then I realized-- it's being pulled down by the eyelids!



current



benchmark (no facepaint along the upper eyelids)



benchmark (you can see it being stretched down)