Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Feathetaria]

/think, /alert, /ponder. Why did they have to do Feathetaria like that? I can't stand this. I wanna cry.

Not even the same character at all

Also on a sidenote, WHY ARE OUR EYEBALLS NOT WHITE? They are like skin colored after 7.0. It's kinda gross. xD

[ConantSivrha]

Also on a sidenote, WHY ARE OUR EYEBALLS NOT WHITE? They are like skin colored after 7.0. It's kinda gross. xD
(…)

I apologize if this comes across as rude, but could you be more specific? In what context do the eyeballs look skin-colored? To me, characters’ scleras (the whites of the eyes) have looked whiter than usual after the update. My two most played characters both have grey skin, however, so it’s possible that you’re noticing something that wouldn’t stand out to me, since I’m not seeing the eyeball color next to a “real” skin color on my own characters. But if the eyeballs do look skin-colored, I can’t see it in the picture you posted, perhaps because of the lighting.

[Rueby]

/think, /alert, /ponder. Why did they have to do Feathetaria like that? I can't stand this. I wanna cry.

Not even the same character at all

Also on a sidenote, WHY ARE OUR EYEBALLS NOT WHITE? They are like skin colored after 7.0. It's kinda gross. xD

I have a palest skin tone and my char's eyes are greyish white, they don't look skin toned to me.. I didn't test it often, do you have more pics with different lighting settings?

Something I observed and perhaps it's obvious, the lighting engine kills that 'constant' look that we had pre-DT, your char looks the same-ish in most lighting conditions unless it's extreme. We're way more affected by light/shadow now, so maybe in dimmer settings the grey-ish white eyes might start to look skin-toned? Then again when I zoom out on my char I feel like hmm there's this weird blur? I'm not sure how to explain it, perhaps it's something they plan to address.

Side note : They butchered your upper lip, my condolences

[Feathetaria]

I have a palest skin tone and my char's eyes are greyish white, they don't look skin toned to me.. I didn't test it often, do you have more pics with different lighting settings?

Here are 2 shots that i found in a discord of someone else's modded character. They used /ponder to look to the right and they took a shot with vanilla eyes then they took a shot with their eye mod where they changed color temp of the white eyeball to lean towards blue and then they turned brightness up a lot.

1st image is DT eyeball color and 2nd image is someone's edit + eye mod.

[smitten_miquitten]

The lighting on these is so dark and there's a bunch of stuff everywhere so it's honestly kinda hard to see still. It'd probably be best to just go in Gpose with neutral lighting and zoom in. The whites of the eyes on the unmodded pic definitely look a good bit darker, but the modded ones are totally lacking the reddish bits at the corners you'd expect to see.

[lunartears]

Also on a sidenote, WHY ARE OUR EYEBALLS NOT WHITE? They are like skin colored after 7.0. It's kinda gross. xD

I know what you're talking about and it's because the eyeball texture was changed to look more realistic and veiny. There's a pinkness around it to replicate flesh, that might be what you've seen. The old texture was just greyish and flat, no veins or pink at all.

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Each time I open the Endwalker benchmark to get some screenshots, I feel so sad. I'm always thinking "Oh so that's where you've been." when I load my creation data.

It would be nice to hear something from the development team about all of the things discussed thus far.

[-Kairi]

I know what you're talking about and I have the answer: It's because the eyeball texture was changed to look more realistic and veiny. There's a pinkness around it to replicate flesh, that might be what you've seen. The old texture was just greyish and flat, no veins or pink at all.

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RE: Eyebrow Changes

Not playing Miqo'te, but I thought I also had grey eyebrows instead of white. However, looking closer it looks like the eyebrows are instead thicker now.
This is just in my case, and not related or the cause of the issue on Miqo'te and the least of my concerns as my hairstyle covers my entire face almost, but i'll point it out regardless.

Top: Old / Bottom: New



God, I miss those old scales.

Really, it's like they've used the paint bucket tool underneath the texture as opposed to colouring the hairs and that's giving the impression of "darker eyebrows". I also reported this change during the Benchmarks.

I'm sure they chose to do this because they wanted to go "realistic/high definition" but it doesn't really fit Au Ra...

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Each time I open the Endwalker benchmark to get some screenshots, I feel so sad. I'm always thinking "Oh so that's where you've been." when I load my creation data.

It would be nice to hear something from the development team about all of the things discussed thus far.

The old scales look so good, actually. Wow.

[lunartears]

The old scales look so good, actually. Wow.

Not sure if this is sarcasm (I know my examples there are awful), but yeah. Even though they were low resolution, at least they didn't have that flat look and crispy outline all over them.

(Old image but still applies even in 7.1)



You don't even need to zoom in to see the bad quality.



I know this game has a lot of pixelated armour but the scales before never looked this bad.

[Larirawiel]

It seems, that they used a sort of upscaling + sharpening for the scales. I still cannot believe, that they do not have any high resolution versions of the textures. It is a standard procedure, that you create high resolution textures first and then you downscale them. Because it is very easy to do that and this is how mip mapping works.


Cheers

[Turnintino]

It seems, that they used a sort of upscaling + sharpening for the scales. I still cannot believe, that they do not have any high resolution versions of the textures. It is a standard procedure, that you create high resolution textures first and then you downscale them. Because it is very easy to do that and this is how mip mapping works.


Cheers

It's pretty likely that they did create them in a higher resolution, originally... They just didn't save the assets. The same issue that plagues many of the FF remasters for games that use pre-rendered backgrounds, for example, which now just look embarrassingly blurry in their respective games, because they couldn't do anything about them without completely remaking those assets from the ground up -- and, apparently, that's out of the question. But we can see now what happens when it's not lol.