Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[noumen0nn]

I miss my old character.



The new one has no personality and looks weird as hell. He always has this blank look on his face now.

JESUS, and I thought I had it bad. This could literally be the poster child for how terrible the graphics update is

[Loggos]

And imo the new textures are not even an artistic improvement if I'm honest. The skin texture doesn't actually look better, the lips look worse in my eyes, and while the hair and eyes are technically higher-res/more "realistic" on the new model they don't actually add any positive artistic value to the character (in my subjective opinion).

Even if it's a bit pixelated the hair on the old model fits the art style a lot better because the reduced level of details matches the semi-realistic art style better than the texture where you can see every strand. And the eyes ironically look less expressive even though the texture is more realistic in the DT version.

This really shows that higher-res/more realistic visuals aren't inherently better and can be beaten aesthetically by a well-balanced art style with fewer details.

[Turnintino]

Gods above, I am begging the devs to give us back our eyebrows.

[CuteBucket]

Here's some more comparisons


Of course mouths were low poly and rough and needed improvement but think they got carried away and forgot to stick to the characters original feel. They look strange and doll like to me now.

What's really interesting about these lips to me is that the new lips still keep the slight :} shape of the inner lip. They completely deleted this from my face 3 F Au Ra, and I've had people telling me it must be a result of the new mesh so I should just get used to it, because that's how the shape has to be for the new mesh to work.

Except here's some new Miqo'te lips that look more like my old Au ra lips that do just that! So no, it's absolutely not a limitation of the mesh, they just didn't have good quality control transferring the old faces onto the new mesh.

[noumen0nn]

What's really interesting about these lips to me is that the new lips still keep the slight :} shape of the inner lip. The completely deleted this from my face 3 F Au Ra, and I've had people telling me it must be a result of the new mesh so I should just get used to it, because that's how the shape has to be for the new mesh to work.

Except here's some new Miqo'te lips that look more like my old Au ra lips that do just that! So no, it's absolutely not a limitation of the mesh, they just didn't have good quality control transferring the old faces onto the new mesh.

Same happens to F midlanders. Miqo'te seem to be one of the only races that kept that shape, but that means it's possible for any of them to have it, it's nothing to do with the new rig

[CuteBucket]

I also want to go back to the eyes because I think much was left out of the public reply.

• The eyelashes are completely different. This has nothing to do with the "direction" they're pointing or darkness or anything like that. They're just completely different eyelashes and I liked the old ones better.
• There is a grey haze over the new eyes, at least on Miqo'te face 4. I haven't seen any acknowledgement of this yet.
• My eye textures looked much sharper and clearer before 7.0. The blurriness feels like a downgrade.
• The eyelid fold above the eyes looked better before. It was more subtle and delicate and pretty. The lid folds have been make much deeper and more exaggerated in 7.0.
• The corners are lower now but that's obvious.
• It was said that catch lights are working as intended, but I believe they are too diffused. This makes the eyes look duller and more lifeless in general, because they don't have the sharp reflective quality of real eyes. My eyes prior to Dawntrail looked more "curved" and also more lively.

The dull grayness of the sclera (white part of the eyes on the sides) has been really bothering me too. No, sclera are not stark white but they aren't GRAY either. The old sclera color was actually much more realistic than the new color. Just another one of those weird choices that bothers me every time I look at the eyes now. Once again, I don't understand how someone looked at this and though, "yeah, that looks much better now."

I don't know if it's just miqo'te, but it does seem like both male and female miqo'te faces had the upper eyelid fold become more prominent and move higher up from the eye, which changes the look of a character quite a lot.

And A lot of them, dare I say, also look kind of...fake? Like the kind of eyelid folds I see on faces that have had a lot of not so great cosmetic surgery. It looks especially unnatural when the character model closes its eyes.

[Moonfallen]

I'm not sure if it's the same for other people, but it seems my character's skin colour on her face is a different shade than the rest of her body. She just looks like she has make up caked on her face the way most of us did in the 2000s (if you were in high school during that time). Don't get to see her freckles or pores anymore. It's like she caked on some concealer or foundation and is so much paler compared to her body. Her skin colour is number 9 in the CC so I know she's already pale but it's not the same pale as before or at least just doesn't match like it used to. I know a friend of mine had to fanta her character because it was driving her crazy that the skin tone of her body did not match that of her hands, feet, and head. It's like the areas that they have reworked are all differing in colour and because of that do not match the body anymore.

[Issaella]

I read that they want to fix some things. That's why I want to speak about this lip problem again.
The shape is sadly completly different and changes the whole expression of the face. I really hope that they can do something about it.

What bothers me most are the missing mouthcorners and the bulging upwards. Before it was just round and cute.
For me, the cute mouth was a very important point when it comes to face 2. At the moment this feature is missing.

I didn't want to engage with this, but it's been eating at me since the first benchmark. Before the first benchmark I was on the fence in terms of buying DT for a number of reasons. After the first benchmark I was firmly in "not buying". This is the primary reason why. My alt (who really became my main in EW I guess) uses the Face 2, wide mouth, "Cirina" customization and it just got absolutely butchered in the "graphics upgrade". Sorry for grabbing your post, but it was the nearest one covering the changes to femra face 2.

There is a laundry list of changes that I dislike; eyes are so yellow now that on any non-human skin-tones they look jaundiced, the eyelashes, the eye-liner darkness, the pupil size, the scales that look like burn scabs, but what they did to the mouth... just why? It looks absolutely nothing like it did pre-7.0. I loved the "fishy face", that's why I used it, now it just looks like a creepy porcelain doll. The dimples are gone, the width across the board is maybe 75% of what it was previously, the lips are permanently pursed and the bottom lip upturned, the lip color goes all the way to the edges. It just looks BAD. And just to rub salt in the wound apparently, some of the mouth changes they made to face 1 and 3 actually look more like the old face 2!

But what is possibly even worse, is how bad the emotes are. When she smiled on the benchmark on the chocobo I physically cringed. Evey smile emote now is "fake smile" with sharply upturned corners and no sideways spreading of the mouth. Like whoever did the rigging has never seen a real human smile before (it seems like this is the case across multiple other faces/races as well). It looks like the false-charm smile of a serial killer and it is difficult to convey how much I hate it.

No changes/adjustments were made in bench 2, nor in 7.0 so I have very little hope they will change anything in 7.1. Simply put, I've been playing 6+ years, I didn't buy DT, I've subbed once to keep my house on my other character, but I'm at the point if I don't see improvement in 7.1, I'm done until 8.0 or maybe even done period. As bad as DT's story seems to be, having to watch 20+ hours of cutscenes with the changes and the awful new facial rigging isn't something I'm willing to pay for. Regardless, my sub is done so that's all I'll say about it. Please fix this.

[Tsiron]

I actually noticed the messed up smiles on my female Au Ra (even though she's face 3 rather than 2), yeah, it's so off-putting! It made watching cutscenes kind of an ordeal put together with everything else off about her appearance...

[Cheapshot]

What's really interesting about these lips to me is that the new lips still keep the slight :} shape of the inner lip. They completely deleted this from my face 3 F Au Ra, and I've had people telling me it must be a result of the new mesh so I should just get used to it, because that's how the shape has to be for the new mesh to work.

Except here's some new Miqo'te lips that look more like my old Au ra lips that do just that! So no, it's absolutely not a limitation of the mesh, they just didn't have good quality control transferring the old faces onto the new mesh.

They adjusted the inner lip to add a lip gap back between the benchmark and 7.0. They didn’t reshape the whole mouth to be like the original tho, they just kinda moved the inner mouth up. I appreciate that they responded to feedback, but I wish it hadnt been such a quick fix. Their fix to the fangs was so much cleaner.