Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[illiere]

My main is a Face 4 Female Veena Viera, and I have literally never been happier with how she looks! I was always iffy about her 6.X appearance, I never truly liked it but it was the best I could get at the time. In my opinion, her new 7.0 face looks miles better than what I had in 6.X. When the 1.1 benchmark came out, I spent a very long time figuring out how I could even further improve her appearance by trying out different options for Face 4 Female Viera in the CC, once I was happy I used a Fantasia in 7.0 to finally have a character whose appearance I love, the team did a great job here. I ask to not change this face drastically or be careful about changes, as I'm now worried that it'll be changed for the worse.
My one request, is that I wouldn't mind if the cupid's bow peaks on Female Viera Face 4 lips were more natural looking, more rounded, and better defined. Right now, the cupid's bow peaks are very square/pointed, and the area around the point seems odd looking, like as if it's misaligned with the colour of the lips (please note, I don't use lipstick for this character). I've attached an image that shows the vanilla 7.0 lips and an edited version that I did quickly in photoshop, hopefully it illustrates the change I'd like to be implemented.



I must also add, I adore the new eye textures! For pretty much everyone. These are exactly the kind of eyes/eye textures that I personally would've implemented and I think they look fantastic! Great job there, in full honesty. I love my Face 4 Female Veena Viera's new eye textures, she has gorgeous eyes now! I also really love how the eye textures look on my alt Face 4 Male Moonkeeper Miqo'te, they suit his personality very well, they have a kind of 'detached''shadowed look to them that I really like. Overall, the eyes, especially with the dynamic lighting, are a big improvement over what we had before.
Unfortunately though, it seems that the eye texture for Face 2 Male Raen Au Ra were changed from the larger pupils in the 1.1 Benchmark to really small pupils in 7.0 Live. I personally greatly preferred the larger pupil eye texture as it made my character look kinder, which is the vibe I wanted for him. Now the 7.0 super tiny pupils make him look more evil, unnatural, and unappealing to me, I don't like them and want the old Male Au Ra Face 2 1.1 Benchmark eye textures back. Or could we please have the larger pupils as an option in CC, let us choose the eye texture?



[2/5]

[illiere]

Other than that though, I am really happy with how the faces for Face 4 Female Veena Viera, Face 3 Male Raava Viera, Face 2 Male Raen Au Ra, and Face 4 Male Moonkeeper Miqo'te, look ingame!
For other races/genders faces; I personally adore how great the Female Au Ra faces turned out! I wanted to make a Female Au Ra character in the past, but the old 6.X faces always looked very off-putting to me, they looked very doll-like with odd proportions (particularly Face 2 Female Au Ra) and empty eyes. Now, with the new 7.0 assets, they look amazing! I adore how great Faces 1,2, and 3 look, please don't make drastic changes to them! They all look so cute, beautiful, and, personally, much more human to me. I genuinely love how gorgeous each of the Female Au Ra faces look now! Pretty eyes, lips, and well-proportioned faces (thank you for fixing the lip texture being misaligned with the mouth on the mesh on Face 2 Female Au Ra.) I also think Face 4 Female Au Ra looks great, but I can understand people wanting that face to look more severe/harsh/sharp. The new Au Ra scales/horns do look lovely though.
Same for Elezen, Elezen faces all look amazing, especially the Female Faces are greatly improved! I love their new eyes/eye makeup in particular. Pretty much all of the faces look great to me and I find I'm often admiring how good everyone looks ingame, I love how Miqo'te look, I love how Hyurs look, I love how cute Lalafell are, and Hrothgar look amazing (the fur shader is a nice touch!), thank you so much for the work that you've done!
I also really like the skin texture details such as pores and wrinkles, it looks really nice! I love little touches like that, makes the characters feel more human.

[3/5]

[illiere]

Now, I did want to list some places for improvement;

- A lot of the races/genders need improvement on their neck seam. The biggest standouts are; Male Elezen, Female Elezen, Male and Female Lalafell, Female Roegadyn, Male Au Ra. These ones are less noticeable but still have visible neckseams; Male Miqo'te, Female Miqo'te, Male Viera, Female Viera.




- Could the diffuse textures for character faces have their resolution increased, please. The diffuse texture is important, and while the normal texture is high res, the diffuse remains low res. This means that Male Miqo'te eyemarks are very blurry and unappealing, it would be nice if this could be improved.




- The body seams on Au Ra need further improvement, and the scales on both their faces and body (especially Female Au Ra body scales!) could use further clean up. There's a noticeable waist seam on Male Au Ra. Female Au Ra Face 1 could use further cleaning up on the face/forehead scales. Male Au Ra Face 1 forehead scales could use improvement, the forehead scales on Male Au Ra Face 2 could be cleaner/clearer.




- Quite a few of the hair meshes have issues. Some of the examples; Male Viera Hair 14 is clipping at the nape of the neck. The G'raha Male Miqo'te hairstyle has broken vertex normals or maybe odd UVs, and clips with itself at the fringe.




- Viera ear textures need further improvement/higher res to better match hair textures. It would also be nice if the hair textures themselves were improved further, but that's low priority.




- Female Roegadyn have issues with their lips and misalignment on all faces. The texturing on their lips seems odd and need to be given another look at, the upper lip/cupid's bow area on Female Roe Faces 1,2, and 3, look like the lip diffuse is misaligned with the lip normal map, Face 4 looks fine though I am unsure if the peaks on the cupid's bow should have a darker colour than the rest of the lip. Please reference screenshots;




- I'm really not sure how much this could be improved without overhauling the body/gear meshes, but the new shadows/lighting system does not play well with the low poly body/gear models. I often have dark lines/shadows on the edges of the polygons/models.




[4/5]

[illiere]

- There's artifacts/blocks on a lot of normal maps for both faces, hair, and gear items. I saw that there were some improvements for certain gear items with 7.05, like the lvl 100 DT Warrior AF gear or the lvl 100 DT Red Mage AF gear, and I would like to see the normal map artifacts/blockiness further improved elsewhere.

- Some expressions have a glitchiness to them, where parts of the face 'twitches'. Expressions like /smile, /grin, /wink, /sneer and /content have the lip corners twitch. Expressions like /scared and /ouch have the inner eyebrow area twitch. It seems to be an bug with the animation/rig so hopefully it gets fixed in the future.

Link to IMGUR Gallery for higher res images, hopefully the embedded images work though; https://imgur.com/a/cdvG8ta

Thank you for reading through this, I look forward to seeing how the Graphics Update progresses with both excitement and anxiety.

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Also, a note to people in this thread. The Graphics Update was always advertised as a rolling update over the 7.X patches. Areas/environments, gear, and NPCs in particular were always stated to be addressed over patches, so if an object or an environment or an NPC isn't updated yet, it's not an issue with the Graphics Update or the Devs being 'Lazy'. It's just not possible to be on a constantly moving platform when developing an active MMORPG, where you need to constantly make new content for players, and also update every part of the game as part of the Graphics Update at once. Have some patience and compassion and understand that things will progress over the course of 7.X, in the case of assets that are yet to be updated.

[5/5]

[Kaziek]

The nostrils feel wider- on all noses. This could be a trick of light, but also could just be tampering with the model itself.

Linking my previous post for screenshot comparison:

Thank you for bringing up the benchmark again, it's actually crazy looking back on it and seeing how much nicer the lighting played with the new faces. I know this isn't a perfect comparison since they changed the time of day for each scene between the benchmarks, but this is with each one looking directly towards the sun.

6.x

Benchmark V1

Live

While there are still things that were definitely off with it (skin looking way too waxy, faces having freckles that didn't before etc.) it was overall much more flattering and felt more faithful to the original lighting. I hope they will reconsider the extremely harsh lighting that they went with in Benchmark v2 and Live, perhaps some sort of middle ground can be achieved.

It's definitely a combination of the lighting and the model being different. Things like the eyes and the lips are absolutely different, and would need to be addressed at the model level. The nose is also a bit different (I really miss the slight bump at the end and the slight curve of the bridge, but that's being super nitpicky) but I think the main issue with it is the lighting. For some reason after the first benchmark they decided to go for this incredibly harsh lighting that ends up making a lot of unflattering shadows, and I believe is the main culprit of faces looking much more doughy and rounded. As you can see in my screenshot of the the V1 benchmark it looks a lot more true to the shape of the old face 1 midlander model.

Hopefully these changes will be both to the models as well as the lighting, because I think both of them are pretty off at the moment and affect many of the faces. Really good points by the way, and all of them things that I have seen other face 1 players feeling the same way about. It seems that most people who have voiced their opinions are in agreement about what went wrong with it.

[much]

My WOL used to have thicker eyebrows and straight eyelashes. Her eyebrows look not good now.. Please return what they looked like before.

[Cherrizini]

I want to participate in the discussion, but I don't know how to share images. The insert image doesn't work for me.

[Kaziek]

I want to participate in the discussion, but I don't know how to share images. The insert image doesn't work for me.

As far as I know you need to upload the image to another site, they don't host images here. Imgur is free and doesn't require an account, simply drag and drop. Hit the ... menu in the top right of an image and copy the BBCode (Forums) link and paste it here.

[Iscah]

I want to participate in the discussion, but I don't know how to share images. The insert image doesn't work for me.

Everyone gets some upload space on the FFXIV website:

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/my/image

Upload your pictures, click to preview it on the page, right-click and "copy link" then use that link with the forum's "insert image" button.

[faiarrow]

You've been incredibly transparent and forward with the information around the update, It's been great to see.

Also, a note to people in this thread. The Graphics Update was always advertised as a rolling update over the 7.X patches. Areas/environments, gear, and NPCs in particular were always stated to be addressed over patches, so if an object or an environment or an NPC isn't updated yet, it's not an issue with the Graphics Update or the Devs being 'Lazy'.

I'd like to note that they have actually not been transparent regarding the update. The whole reason there has been such an outcry from veteran and new players alike stating that there hasn't been proper care for the developer intention with the character update issued THIRCE by the development team re: working hard to keep the same impression prior to the first benchmark and here within is because they saw their characters changed or outright butchered for the sake of polygon unification. Even on the JP forums there have been posts with multiple interviews and videos linked with timestamps about what had actually been discussed and just how many months there were between updates, and the actual information we got prior to the bench was truly spartan.

It also didn't help that they only showed the primary 'first face' that would load for each race in a single clan for most of the update shots, complete with mismatched lighting that masked a lot of problems we then found out with the benches and now the live game.

(Hellsguard and Duskwight shaking hands right now for feeling utterly miserable we didn't get to really see our 'updates' until the bench..)

I'm glad there are definitely people out there who did win and got a glow up, but as someone who lost my character heading for 10 years of playtime since I began my journey with her as a hellsguard femroe, who has seen what feels like the complete loss of racial uniqueness and traits due to the changes, it's hard to have faith that things were actually done with care. I try to believe and have faith it was not the design and art team's intention, but after providing months of feedback (since October 2023! When I first saw the eyes were being made what they are now) to have nothing done regarding it and seeing more popular races "fixed" (barely) or adjusted when just as valid feedback was given from our player base was soul crushing.

The development team are only human, yes, but they're also working for one of the most financially successful MMOs and companies in the industry right now. The fact that there was less open transparency about this update and questions to the playerbase than the downgrade 1.0 > ARR had is honestly wild.