Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Vandi]

So I’ve taken all day at work to process the initial shock of changes. I admit, loosing aspects of my character I’ve come to love (specifically the eye intensity and radiant glow) still sting. At the same time, however, I’m forced to ponder that. . .I don’t think the devs did this at ALL with malicious intent. Just the opposite, they were trying to boost the standard to make things visually even more appealing. Yes, mistakes were made, and if they knew this would be the outcome, it’s most likely they’d have done a few things differently. It’s difficult sometimes, but check people’s motives. If they’re genuinely trying to help, give ‘em credit.

Not everything turned out bad either. You mid and Highlander Hyurs are absolutely friggin BEAUTIFUL, like insanely so, and you miqo are downright yummy too. Stubbornly staying femroe til hell freezes over, you sexy hroth mamas be damned! Hmph!

[rainichan]

- Before Dawntrail -

Ah, you have the same face/eye set I do. The 1.0 benchmark the eyes looked fine, but the 1.1 made them look weird. The 6.58 version eyes had shading along the water line (where the eyelashes are on the bottom) and it's missing in DT, which makes it look really jarring, and so it makes the lashes on the bottom look like a bad fake lash glue job. It is my only complaint for my character, I like the rest of how she looks, but the one issue with the eyes is messing with me. I submitted it THREE TIMES to the bug report forum, with the first two being rejected despite the info that I had to include being... useless to the actual complaint, but because it got held up like that, I think it wasn't fixed in time. I'm hoping some fixes come in hotfixes and future patches so we're all happy with our character's looks.

[Katt_Felista]

So I’ve taken all day at work to process the initial shock of changes. I admit, loosing aspects of my character I’ve come to love (specifically the eye intensity and radiant glow) still sting. At the same time, however, I’m forced to ponder that. . .I don’t think the devs did this at ALL with malicious intent. Just the opposite, they were trying to boost the standard to make things visually even more appealing. Yes, mistakes were made, and if they knew this would be the outcome, it’s most likely they’d have done a few things differently. It’s difficult sometimes, but check people’s motives. If they’re genuinely trying to help, give ‘em credit.

Not everything turned out bad either. You mid and Highlander Hyurs are absolutely friggin BEAUTIFUL, like insanely so, and you miqo are downright yummy too. Stubbornly staying femroe til hell freezes over, you sexy hroth mamas be damned! Hmph!

Part of it is a rendering "issue" or new way of rendering things, if you disable ambiant occlusion and play with the self illumination / lightning setting you can almost, almost get back to where it was pre patch but there is no denying there is also a deliberate choice to change the topology and rotate sometimes eyes a certain way, make them more droopy / inclinated in ways that were not like that before, chins and noses, proportions of the face has sometimes changed, in subtle ways but anyone knowing the looks of their character prior to this and paying attention documented the topology changes, i wouldn't go buy illusion philters right now because i do believe that Square isn't as incompetent as to let things be this way, people come up with very objective proofs that their faces structure have been changed down to the topology / edgeloops slightly displaced here and there sometimes.

[AstiSpumante]

I will say, cranking Gamma (system settings > Display) all the way down to zero helps a little but also highlights the fact that all my issues are from huge changes to the face sculpt. I went for the last cutscene before DT for comparison shots to control for camera angle and lighting as much as possible.



It's not a bad face but it's not what I want at all. It's also 90% the change in mouth and lip shape/size although it would be nice to have a small pupil option as well.

And also I cannot bring up enough how absolutely ??? the decision to slap a hot pink overlay on everything labeled ear is. It's not always this bright but there is always at least some hot pink there even with only the faintest amount of back lighting. It's not even applied well since some of the glow ends up on thick parts where it absolutely shouldn't be. :/



On a positive note: my lizard no longer has hot dog fingers which IS a QoL update I have wanted for forever.

[noumen0nn]

So I’ve taken all day at work to process the initial shock of changes. I admit, loosing aspects of my character I’ve come to love (specifically the eye intensity and radiant glow) still sting. At the same time, however, I’m forced to ponder that. . .I don’t think the devs did this at ALL with malicious intent. Just the opposite, they were trying to boost the standard to make things visually even more appealing. Yes, mistakes were made, and if they knew this would be the outcome, it’s most likely they’d have done a few things differently. It’s difficult sometimes, but check people’s motives. If they’re genuinely trying to help, give ‘em credit.

Not everything turned out bad either. You mid and Highlander Hyurs are absolutely friggin BEAUTIFUL, like insanely so, and you miqo are downright yummy too. Stubbornly staying femroe til hell freezes over, you sexy hroth mamas be damned! Hmph!

Not sure which midlanders you're looking at, but I'm happy for them. Mine turned out so hideous that I keep instinctively turning my head away from the screen when her face shows up in a cutscene.

Don't get me wrong though, I never assumed malice on the devs part. I'm sure they did the best they could with the time and tools they had. It's just that their best, this time, sucks. Shoddy work coming from a team of professionals doesn't deserve credit, well-intentioned or not.

[Cheapshot]

I want to take my time and do a very detailed breakdown of my face and give clear suggestions on what I think would improve it, but I still need to calm and rest before I do so. I want to put my best self to the task instead of the me still feeling very raw and mournful.

Just for now however, I wanted to bring attention to a problem I noticed with the eyes ahead of time, since this wont require much explanation or any comparisons.


I've been bothered by how grey the whites of the eyes are in Dawntrail, but I also noticed that my pupils were grey as well. My eyelashes appeared darker than my pupils! I was wondering why and I had a hunch so I tested it out and sure enough:


For some reason, pupil darkness is tied to eyecolor! The lighter the eye colour, the greyer the pupil with a slight tint depending on eyecolor. While this example may look cool as heck, I would say this is certainly not a good thing. The greyness of the eye whites, the greyness of the pupils, and the strong shadow cast by the upper eyelid combine to make eyes look very dull and lifeless. I hope that the greyness of eye whites can be cleared up and that pupils can be made consistently black to fix that.

[azaleai]

I don't have evidence, but the more I think about it, it looks like it was "upgraded" using a light touch of AI.

That's a good explanation of why you would obtain "doll" faces in female models

I've been pondering on this and... I think you might be right. Concerning the textures at least - I don't think AI is particularly advanced when it comes to 3D work.

My lip misalignment issue did sorta exist on the old normal maps; there appeared to be two lines that could be interpreted as the apex of the upper lip. It didn't register as an issue then because the models and textures were lower res and more stylised and there was no texturing on the lips to 100% define lips and skin.

As well as that, AI wouldn't know how to handle Roegadyn's brows so it would smooth out the inhuman creases on the nomal map, but it makes sense for diffuse maps to maintain more of their detail since they can contain freckles, tattoos, makeup or scars.

I can't fathom a human artist looking at roe face 2 right now and being proud of their work, nor of thinking "this looks good!", but a machine with lacking human oversight? Yeah, I can believe that.

As much as I as a game artist myself am loathe to assume the use of AI rather than actual human artist's love and care, it makes this bitter pill slightly easier to swallow - it's not a human maliciously deciding the least played race can remain ugly for all they care or some overworked soul going "eh, close enough", but rather a skeleton team relying on technology to do the work for them because they simply don't have the manpower to do it manually as fast as the higher-ups are requiring them to.

Either way, I still stand by the fact I think they should have taken a lot longer to do this upgrade. perhaps starting with environments and lighting and taken another year or a patch or two to do the characters right. It's really not that hard to just update the models and textures to a higher resolution but change nothing else, but it does take a lot of time, care and effort.

[ShizuForever]

I find it kind of funny given their sudden push for 'realism' over the lovely stylisation we had that it's seen it get so light.

Same, I play this game so that I don't have to look at real faces because I genuinely like anime faces over faces in real life. I actually can't hold eye contact with others IRL because I have a fear of realistic faces. I am genuinely contemplating stopping subscription if this doesnt get fixed by the time 7.1 comes out due to it just simply being impossible to do MSQ while having to keep convincing myself that these faces are not real. The NPCs' faces have all of a sudden became super realistic. Especially when they (and to an extension, the character that 'I' became since the "graphical """update"""") open their mouth the interior of the mouth with all the clarity is like super freaky. Please fix.

[TheDustyOne]

I've been pondering on this and... I think you might be right. Concerning the textures at least - I don't think AI is particularly advanced when it comes to 3D work.

Someone can fact-check me on this, but I remember an old interview (was it just before or just after EW launch?) where Yoshida talked about how they planned to upscale the textures, but because of the sheer volume of textures, would use AI with human touch-ups. I'll see if I can find it.

Edit: Couldn't find anything definitive about the new textures being AI (although it wouldn't surprise me), but I did get confirmation that the UI updates from 5.5 were AI scaled with human touch-ups: https://gamerescape.com/2021/04/12/s...ture-upgrades/

[ConantSivrha]

I've been bothered by how grey the whites of the eyes are in Dawntrail, but I also noticed that my pupils were grey as well. My eyelashes appeared darker than my pupils! I was wondering why and I had a hunch so I tested it out and sure enough:


For some reason, pupil darkness is tied to eyecolor! The lighter the eye colour, the greyer the pupil with a slight tint depending on eyecolor. While this example may look cool as heck, I would say this is certainly not a good thing. The greyness of the eye whites, the greyness of the pupils, and the strong shadow cast by the upper eyelid combine to make eyes look very dull and lifeless. I hope that the greyness of eye whites can be cleared up and that pupils can be made consistently black to fix that.

This pupil color...situation existed before the graphics update. Some races were affected more than others. (Seems like the update made it more obvious, especially on moon miqo'te, with their large pupils.) In my opinion, very light eye colors have always looked strange and unearthly because of it. Though, some people do like it.