Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Khryseis_Astra]

My mother doesn't have a defined philtrum...alot of chars had 'subtle' philtrums, some I think barely any, but now philtrums are cranked to 11, if you didn't have it, now you do. Wide philtrum? Nah squished pronounced one.

This is an entirely different mouth shape...

Definitely… In this picture, it looks like they actually squished this character’s philtrum, which results in her cupid’s bow being pinched in for a totally different lip shape. But the philtrums are also more emphasized and don’t blend into the faces well anymore. The biggest problem I see is this area of the face looking “pinched in” so most faces either look like they’re biting the rest of their upper lips back, or just had them straight up cut in half.

[Anarnee]

This new reply feels exactly the same as the one we got before the full release, and I don't feel like they did much at all to correct the things complained about in the benchmark before release so I have very little hope for 7.1 either, not to mention them still not acknowledging anything else about the graphics stuff bothering people.

I don't want to get my hopes up again like I did when they promised us before, but I am really thankful to the other Femroe face 2 girlies that have continued to post about how badly they recreated the face. I try to get new stuff from time to time but I get so upset looking at the new face in gpose I always end up having to walk away.

I don't know a ton about technical stuff when it comes to modeling so I would appreciate if someone would correct me or explain if I'm off base, but having see all the faces have been put on the same mesh, the only reasoning they would do that that came to mind was to makes something easier on their end when it game to making things in the future, which to me makes it feel like a corner cutting solution, and not something that was ever meant to benefit us. It feels like some of us were just going to be screwed over no matter what and that they made these choices knowing full well it would ruin some of the more unique faces.

[noumen0nn]

Sorry but anyone who says these new philtrums are normal are just objectively incorrect. I’ve never seen a single person in real life have the wide-ass unnatural philtrums we have in DT. It looks completely insane, and I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about it.

And that’s not to mention the Pizza Hut logo upper lip some people have. If you stop and really think about some of these (completely unnecessary) changes, you realize how weird this entire situation with the graphics rollout is. The work was outsourced, that’s the only logical explanation.

When you say wide, do you mean deep? The wider philtrum, the picture on the left, is the old graphics and is the feature that I want restored alongside the wider cupid's bow.

[Astronis]

I don't know a ton about technical stuff when it comes to modeling so I would appreciate if someone would correct me or explain if I'm off base, but having see all the faces have been put on the same mesh, the only reasoning they would do that that came to mind was to makes something easier on their end when it game to making things in the future, which to me makes it feel like a corner cutting solution, and not something that was ever meant to benefit us. It feels like some of us were just going to be screwed over no matter what and that they made these choices knowing full well it would ruin some of the more unique faces.

Consider the things it would make easier on their end, and decide if those things would be of any benefit to us. What do you think they could do with every face (including hrothgars) on the same mesh? I think they could make more non-racially locked hairs, or more emotes since they don't have to make them several times over, or hell, maybe even viera hats, but that's getting into the realm of quantum hopium.

Putting in a ton of up-front work in order to make things easier down the road doesn't strike me as a something one does in order to cut corners. It's something people do to make a solid foundation to build on so they don't have to cut corners later. Who knows if it'll pan out.

[Doopliss]

Regarding the philtrum for ♀ Midlander faces, I thought this JP user made an extremely good, extensive post about something I did not notice before:

「プレイヤーキャラクターのグラフィックに関するフィードバックへの対応について」のお知らせ拝読しました。

その中で「① ポリゴンやノーマルマップの精度向上により明確な変化が出てしまったもの」の文章内


「微妙」「軽微」とありますが明らかに作業ミス・チェック漏れ、あるいはクリエイター側の判断で強引に決めてしまったのかと疑いたくなる「全く異なる部分」がありますので、本投稿にて再度の修正要望を出させていただきます。よろしくお願いします。
以前に修正要望を出した【こちら】の内容の続きとなります。


黄金のレガシー／ヒューラン ミッドランダー女性「顔タイプ:１」のキャラクタークリエイトで
「人中」と「口の形」が4タイプとも全て「顔タイプ:２」と同じになっている

先に問題の「黄金のレガシー」側から説明します。


顔全体画像の口タイプは「1」です。
続いて4タイプ別「人中」と「口の形」の比較画像です。唇の色はすべて207,134,127（濃い）で同じです。






これのどこが「微妙」「軽微」なのでしょうか。そもそも「1顔」の人中・口の形をアップデートしていないのですからこれでは印象がおかしくなって当たり前です。もはや「1顔」ではありません。「グラフィックスや計算精度が向上」等々、制作環境設備機器のハイスペック化以前のことです。

「2顔」も詳しく見ると人中・口の形が違ってアップデートされていますが、当方は「2顔」キャラを使用していませんので今は詳細な言及を避けますが、はっきり言えることは「1顔」でも「2顔」でもない人中・口の形を作って、それを両方に使っているのです。


ここからは「暁月のフィナーレ」の旧グラフィックの「人中」と「口の形」です。

こちらをご覧いただければ上記で説明した内容との明らかな違い、間違ったグラフィックスアップデートの作業をしていることがお分かりいただけるはずです。


顔全体画像の口タイプは「1」です。
続いて4タイプ別「人中」と「口の形」の比較画像です。唇の色はすべて207,134,127（濃い）で同じです。






こちらの勝手な推測ですが、「2顔」を先に作業してそれを持ってきて「1顔」作業して置き換え忘れたとか、単純な作業ミスやチェック漏れ、あるいはクリエイター側の勝手な判断で決めてしまったのでしょうか。さすがに手抜きという事はないと思いたいですが、これを製品版として送り出すなどゲームグラフィック制作のプロの仕事とは思えません。

以上今回は「人中」と「口の形」の追加要望となりました。「目」も全然違うのですがそちらも以前に修正要望を出しており改善されるか次回パッチで確認したいと思います。

旧グラフィック選択制にしていただけないのなら向かう方向はたった一つ、ミッドランダー女性「顔タイプ:１」の顔パーツ全て暁月までのものに修正していただき、印象を旧グラフィックに限りなく近づけていただきたいです。

何卒宜しくお願い致します。

While the lip shapes for these faces have always been somewhat similar, it appears that the philtrum and cupid's bow for Face 1 and Face 2 have been made identical in the update, when those parts of their lips were distinctly different from one another throughout 1.x-6.x. The entire curve of their bottom lip inexplicably changed for both of them, too, making them larger...

The bottom image of both sections comparing the different lip shapes from 7.x and 6.x accordingly also show how there is virtually no difference between the two lips now, when before they still had distinct outlines from one another. It's no wonder ♀ Midlander faces have felt suddenly difficult for me to tell apart. They absolutely should not be leaving things in this state, as, many users and myself have said before, the update has lessened our diversity of options.

The user was wondering if they started on Face 2, and just edited Face 1 from there and forgot to adjust the lips. From what I've noticed myself, ♀ Roegadyn have a similar issue going on, where it looks like the philtrum on all of their faces only line up for Face 4's mouth. Again, things like this don't make their newest statement feel honest.

Also, if quoting this user's post over here causes them any discomfort, or seems rude, I will delete this post. Still, for those affected by this issue, I'd recommend upvoting their post over there...

[azaleai]

I don't know a ton about technical stuff when it comes to modeling so I would appreciate if someone would correct me or explain if I'm off base, but having see all the faces have been put on the same mesh, the only reasoning they would do that that came to mind was to makes something easier on their end when it game to making things in the future, which to me makes it feel like a corner cutting solution, and not something that was ever meant to benefit us. It feels like some of us were just going to be screwed over no matter what and that they made these choices knowing full well it would ruin some of the more unique faces.

This is a pretty technical explaination so please bear with me, I'll try to explain it as plainly as I can.

From what I understand of it, what they've done is they had one face mesh with a specific number of polygons (let's assume hyur, since that's the base for a lot of things). This face is then weighted (the data telling it which bone to move with - what's upper lip, what's left eye, what only moves with the head itself). They then morph the shape into, say, the roegadyn face. The purpose is to make sure the polygons and weights are uniform across races, which theoretically could save them time animating expressions (a hyur emote should basically work on the new roegadyn face) or scaling headgear and hairs (the same morpher can be applied as is applied to the face), perhaps with some minor tweaking. These morphed faces are exported on their end and added to the game files, so what we're recieving is still unique faces for every race (if you were to find the file for the hyur face and delete it, the roegadyn face would still exist), they were simply created from the same base on their end.

This process isn't necessarily a bad thing... While it doesn't really give us anything specific aside from possibly more/faster emotes/hairs/etc later on, it wouldn't necessarily detract anything from us either - provided they created the base face with enough polygon density to satisfy the shapes of all the races they wanted to morph it into (think enough model detail to shape a specific nose) and the people in charge of where each polygon gets morphed to are closely referencing the original faces, there could be very little noticable difference. Making the one original mesh match all these difference faces with morphers wouldn't be a simple task, but it would save them trouble for things down the line. But I think this morphing process is where they tripped up, especially with the lips. I don't think any face's lips are the same shape as they used to be. It would require a lot of careful work to do correctly, and I feel like it ended up being rushed. Not to mention... morphing a hyur face into a lalafell or a hrothgar? You're going to end up with really bad poly density. Imo it would be worth using between some faces, but not all of them.

The big issue with using this process is (and where most of the issues for us femroe face 2 girlies comes in) is the fact that this means they are not sculpting a high poly mesh for all of these faces. The way you typically create models for games is you create two models of the same thing - one lower detail and easier to render that will end up in the game files, another much, much higher detail that contains every single detail the model should have - every crease, blemish, wrinkle, all of the texture of skin, metal or fabrics. These models are massive and having multiple of these to render in a scene will absolutely tank your PC's performance (if you've heard of the 1.0 flower barrel, this is exactly what happened there). What the artists then do is get programs to render a 'normal map' from the high poly mesh onto the low poly - it creates a texture map that uses the red, blue and green channels as data representing the xyz coordinates of a 3D space that tells the game engine to pretend specific pixels are facing in different directions - even those on the same polygon. This fakes the look of a much higher poly model (and therefore much higher resolution graphics) while being far, far easier to render.

The only particularly accurate way to create these normal maps is to bake (render) them from a high poly. If they're morphing these faces into one another, they aren't making high poly sculpts to bake from, so they're generating the normal maps in other ways (I suspect AI, because even photoshop's tool to generate a normal map from another texture like a diffuse (the colour texture) is better than what we've got...). Which means someone should be ensuring the normals line up with the face models they have and the other textures they've been given - which, they clearly haven't, see my previous posts about face 2's lips.

Basically... the process they've chosen would save a lot of time later on down the line, but requires a lot of upfront effort to get things right to make good on their promise to maintain the same look and feel. Except they don't appear to have put in enough of that upfront effort, I suspect due to time constraints, lack of manpower, not enough budget, or a combination of all three... Or not caring, but despite everything, I'd still prefer not to consider that option.

So... yes. it's mainly to make things easier on their end later, but they're making the actual creating the faces part a lot more complex

[Cherrizini]

This, also please don't touch Zenos' face, I look at what happened to Thancred and feel nothing but dread for my favorites.

Not only did my character change which caused enough grief, but now I dread what they'd do to NPCs that I love way more than my character. It concerns me and honestly instills fear/distrust in me.

I hope they do not touch the rest of the NPCs. Emet-Selch (and Hades) were good looking before and this update made them even better, but other ones like Thancred, lost their spark.

[Hejligan]

What worries me about the announcement me are statements like this:

"As noted previously, these issues are a result of the improvements made to graphical and computational accuracy, which have resulted in smoother visuals and a clearer representation of what was intended by the original data."

What especially bugs me is the: "[...] a clearer representation of what was intended by the original data."

What exactly is that supposed to imply?

When you design anything, it is the finished product that matters. When those designers more than a decade ago designed the original models, it was the actual finished output that met the players' eyes that was the intention, not some obscure notion of "what the data intended": the data intends nothing, the designer does, the data is rather a tool to accomplish a vision.

A good example of this fallacy regards old pixel-art games. One might argue that modern high-resolution displays "more accurately display what the original data intended", but actually, those games were designed with the imperfections of CRT-displays to create a more fluid, less pixelated image, which is completely destroyed by modern displays, despite ostensibly being more "accurate".

Or do they mean to tell us that our experiences for the past decade or more with our characters is somehow wrong because of this secret gem of data they are sitting on? Even though they themselves have admitted that they will try to respect our actual experiences of our characters for the past decade and will therefore try to change them as little as possible. Have they changed tune?

The graphical update changed my character from having obviously quite round eyes to now having really rather oval eyes. Are they implying that this might just have been intended all along (despite everyone from the past decade, including me, experiencing that my character has roundish eyes), but we are all too blind to see what this secret holy nugget of data truly "intends"?

I do hold out hope that they might still fix things like this, since other parts of their post were more hopeful, but this talk of "what the data intends" really worries me. That is not how design works.

[Anarnee]

This is a pretty technical explaination so please bear with me, I'll try to explain it as plainly as I can.

Thanks so much for the detailed and thorough breakdown, your posts are always wonderful and informative. I really appreciate you taking the time to do the write up. I think I understood most of it. I have noticed some of this stuff in other games before, like in KH, where the is a model with a ton of expression and detail for CS and others that have way less for outside of CS, but I imagine then they'd have an even more detailed model that the CS model was based one.

I want so badly to believe this had been done with good intentions, and I'm a proponent of getting the artist the tools then need, even AI, to help facilitate their work, but it's exactly because of how rushed and inaccurate so many things have been that I'm on the other end of it. I wish we could see the high poly models they're working from, cause it really feels like the new femroe face is so different from not just the other model but also from the art we've seen over the years. The new nose for instance being so round like a hyur nose... We had rounded noses in the game before, so it's hard to believe that the weird bulbous noses they have now are more "on spec" when they had rounded noses in the game and then gave Femroe sharp noses. And that's just one feature.

More emotes, more hair, more ways to express our character would be great, but a lot of the new feature samey and it's hard to believe that any human was involved with reviewing these features. Instead of getting more things it's like lets make the models all look like these popular ones. Shouldn't be that we have to lose stuff in order for other features to be made functional.

What worries me about the announcement me are statements like this:

"As noted previously, these issues are a result of the improvements made to graphical and computational accuracy, which have resulted in smoother visuals and a clearer representation of what was intended by the original data."

What especially bugs me is the: "[...] a clearer representation of what was intended by the original data."

What exactly is that supposed to imply?

Couldn't agree more! It's like, cool that you have this data that tells you what something "should" look like but that's not what I was sold in 2013 and that's not what I've been putting my money into all these years. They should have made sure that the models looked like the models we have FIRST and then if they wanted to give features from this other data they could have added that later when expanding the CC.

[Turnintino]

"As noted previously, these issues are a result of the improvements made to graphical and computational accuracy, which have resulted in smoother visuals and a clearer representation of what was intended by the original data."

It's also, again, disingenuous, because it suggests that these are still the original models, or that the normal maps have simply been upscaled from the originals, and the new lighting and higher fidelity simply revealed what was always there -- when we know both are completely brand new. The diffuse maps I could believe are simply machine upscales, and some clearly got more human attention in the editing process than others, if that's the case, but there's nothing "original" about any other element of the update.