Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Tahli]

quote

Not sure which hairstyle your friend is using, but the eyebrow change on Face 2 female Miqo is pretty extreme, personally speaking. Even the softest arc/non-thin eyebrow shape is very sharp and angry now.

[Lorika]

Doubt so. It's just that they for some reason went for an art-style shift rather than sticking to what they had going.

Done in 30 secondes by myself (using ComfyUI and a SD1.5 Model)
https://imgur.com/S3YZ777

[ConantSivrha]

Done in 30 secondes by myself (using ComfyUI and a SD1.5 Model)
https://imgur.com/S3YZ777

I’m not exactly happy to play defense for the update, but this particular claim seems unfounded. One random AI-generated image of an eye doesn’t do anything to suggest that our new eyes were AI-generated. Our eyes don’t even look similar to this one.

My subjective opinion is that the new wet-looking sclera looks nice—it makes the characters look more alive to me. I feel like eyes are supposed to be wet. But it is still a deviation from the game’s previous art style, so I understand why some people dislike it.

[Khryseis_Astra]

My subjective opinion is that the new wet-looking sclera looks nice—it makes the characters look more alive to me. I feel like eyes are supposed to be wet. But it is still a deviation from the game’s previous art style, so I understand why some people dislike it.

If it just looked wet, ok. But they made it look gray, which has the effect of making the eyes sink into the face. The eyes were the thing that stood out the most on my original Highlander. There’s no brightness to them anymore. It’s not so bad on some races/faces, but with the changes to eye shape, darkened shadow/eyeliner and I swear even the pupil position, what little of the sclera shows being gray just makes the eyes look like black holes.

[Burmecia]

hello, thread. it's late but something made me look at my character in game and ruminate the graphics update again.

i am happy that most of my characters, and i have many, made it to the other side ok looking. but some others, jitah'li here included, didn't i think.

i have been patient to not burn the free fantasia to change i am not 100% about.

i've had some success in restoring his appearance by tweaking his colours and playing with non-fantasia needed options. he looks better, i think, but here comes the frustration:

i try to live with it, but i cannot get over his dull eyes (face4/eyes3).



why do they have to catch light like that? QQ
why i care so much? realistically i look at his back most of the time i play. guess i like looking at his face, too...
what makes it even more annoying is that all it takes is to tilt camera a little to have his old eyes look back at me :/

[CuteBucket]

Also a face 4 male miqo here and I hate hate HATE the dark shadow they added to the top of the eyes. It makes all of the miqo'te boys but especially face 4 look heavily-lidded and half asleep where they were once previously bright-eyed and alert looking. It's not even part of the eye texture itself, it's a separate file that adds a shadow from the top lid over the eyes. It looks okay on some faces, especially the big-eyed female miqo'te models, but it looks AWFUL on the males because it's not scaled to fit the actual size of the eye. So while the shadow covers only, say, 10% of a female miqo'te's eyes, the shadow covers more like 40% of male face 4's eyes. It totally changes the look and feel of their eyes to have a shadow that prominent and dark, and I am baffled on how any character designer or artist could look at that and say, "yeah looks great."

It's a stupid change for no reason. We didn't need this. The old models didn't have that extra shadow there, and I don't know why anyone thought we wanted it. The characters with big eyes can't see it much and the characters with small eyes now have a significant portion of their eyes hidden by it.

[Kaziek]

Also a face 4 male miqo here and I hate hate HATE the dark shadow they added to the top of the eyes. It makes all of the miqo'te boys but especially face 4 look heavily-lidded and half asleep where they were once previously bright-eyed and alert looking. It's not even part of the eye texture itself, it's a separate file that adds a shadow from the top lid over the eyes. It looks okay on some faces, especially the big-eyed female miqo'te models, but it looks AWFUL on the males because it's not scaled to fit the actual size of the eye. So while the shadow covers only, say, 10% of a female miqo'te's eyes, the shadow covers more like 40% of male face 4's eyes. It totally changes the look and feel of their eyes to have a shadow that prominent and dark, and I am baffled on how any character designer or artist could look at that and say, "yeah looks great."

It's a stupid change for no reason. We didn't need this. The old models didn't have that extra shadow there, and I don't know why anyone thought we wanted it. The characters with big eyes can't see it much and the characters with small eyes now have a significant portion of their eyes hidden by it.

It's very strange because some of the old models DID have that shadow and they lessened it on some of those. It's the same thing with eye makeup too, it seems like they randomly decided to add or remove it instead of following what the original models had.

[Lorika]

It's very strange because some of the old models DID have that shadow and they lessened it on some of those. It's the same thing with eye makeup too, it seems like they randomly decided to add or remove it instead of following what the original models had.

Yeah for the make up it's weird.
A very visible one it's Minfillia at the end of ARR, were before she had a clearly visible blue make up on her eylid, while now it's only some sort of black shadow.
The same with Face 6 of Midlanders female were the colors for the second option (the light one) for eyelid is almost completly overridden by a black shadow.

[GrizzlyTank]

hello, thread. it's late but something made me look at my character in game and ruminate the graphics update again.

i am happy that most of my characters, and i have many, made it to the other side ok looking. but some others, jitah'li here included, didn't i think.

i have been patient to not burn the free fantasia to change i am not 100% about.

i've had some success in restoring his appearance by tweaking his colours and playing with non-fantasia needed options. he looks better, i think, but here comes the frustration:

i try to live with it, but i cannot get over his dull eyes (face4/eyes3).



why do they have to catch light like that? QQ
why i care so much? realistically i look at his back most of the time i play. guess i like looking at his face, too...
what makes it even more annoying is that all it takes is to tilt camera a little to have his old eyes look back at me :/

Because you see, realistic catchlight is he only thing that matters! *pushes glasses*...

Though seriously, i still don't get the random push to realism with the eyes when they were and have always been somewhat stylized. Ok it looked slightly different in the character creator, but that as we all know have always been a bit off and how it was in-game should have been the standard.

[Iscah]

Because you see, realistic catchlight is he only thing that matters! *pushes glasses*...

Though seriously, i still don't get the random push to realism with the eyes when they were and have always been somewhat stylized. Ok it looked slightly different in the character creator, but that as we all know have always been a bit off and how it was in-game should have been the standard.

They just had the look of the game right with the stylisation and nothing I've seen since the update makes me think "wow that looks good because it is realistically lit and shadowed". If anything it just shows up how un-accurate the lighting is behaving.