Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Plasmaspy]

It seems like the mouth corners have regained a bit of their definition, but overall it still feels way too "pinched" and narrow, and the dimples are still MIA... I'm not flinching every time I see my character anymore, but it still doesn't look "her".

I definately think we (who share the same au ra face 2) possibly got the biggest mouth change and consequently whole general appearance alteration of any race

[FateweaverAlpha]

So, I SWEAR I logged in yesterday after the patch and still saw the eye bags. Once I saw your reply and Tsumdere’s reply in here, I logged back in and now they appear to be gone. Maybe I was so used to seeing them, I… hallucinated them?

Anyways, I stand corrected. \o/

I think it's a bit of both tbh. They're still very much there, at least on my Duskwight Face 2 character, but the dark shading was taken away to give the appearance of them being fully removed.
Zooming up on Luc's eye in portrait mode shows the baggy wrinkles still there under his eye just not shaded anymore to give that haggard raccoon eye appearance.

[Visthra]

I think it's a bit of both tbh. They're still very much there, at least on my Duskwight Face 2 character, but the dark shading was taken away to give the appearance of them being fully removed.
Zooming up on Luc's eye in portrait mode shows the baggy wrinkles still there under his eye just not shaded anymore to give that haggard raccoon eye appearance.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. I’m okay with it though - my issue was with the dark shading. I specifically chose Duskwight to avoid that dark eye shading, so I’m just glad it’s gone. I hope you’re happy too.

[FateweaverAlpha]

Yeah, I can definitely see that. I’m okay with it though - my issue was with the dark shading. I specifically chose Duskwight to avoid that dark eye shading, so I’m just glad it’s gone. I hope you’re happy too.

Sadly in my character's case there's a slew of other issues that are affecting him. The removal of the dark shadows helped but his skin is extremely shiny (weirdly more so after this update), his eyebrows are still shaped wrong and too low on the brow ridge, eyes are a completely different shape from the original, his cheekbones are still greatly lessened from what they used to be, and his chin is much larger than the original.

Apparently I picked all the parts that they managed to massively change creating an entirely new character. O_x

[Visthra]

Sadly in my character's case there's a slew of other issues that are affecting him. The removal of the dark shadows helped but his skin is extremely shiny (weirdly more so after this update), his eyebrows are still shaped wrong and too low on the brow ridge, eyes are a completely different shape from the original, his cheekbones are still greatly lessened from what they used to be, and his chin is much larger than the original.

Apparently I picked all the parts that they managed to massively change creating an entirely new character. O_x

I think your character looks good, if that’s any consolation.

[FateweaverAlpha]

I think your character looks good, if that’s any consolation.

I appreciate the sentiment. Sadly he's just not Luc to me. Probably would have been easier to accept if I hadn't based him on a long time OC of mine. UnU Thank you though. I'm glad your character is better for the update. ^w^

[azaleai]

Zooming up on Luc's eye in portrait mode shows the baggy wrinkles still there under his eye just not shaded anymore to give that haggard raccoon eye appearance.

How come you can get such tiny defined wrinkles on your normal map but my previously well defined inner brow crease is completely absent and smooth, replaced with a shitty painted on line??



The difference in the level of details included on these faces is absurd. They don't belong in the same game. Couldn't they have taken a little less time on the male's carefully placed and defined wrinkles (hello, miqo male face 2?? any roe male face??) and given female faces the same treatment, rather than this awful airbrushy freaky look?

[FateweaverAlpha]

How come you can get such tiny defined wrinkles on your normal map but my previously well defined inner brow crease is completely absent and smooth, replaced with a shitty painted on line??



The difference in the level of details included on these faces is absurd. They don't belong in the same game. Couldn't they have taken a little less time on the male's carefully placed and defined wrinkles (hello, miqo male face 2?? any roe male face??) and given female faces the same treatment, rather than this awful airbrushy freaky look?

Honestly I'd trade you in a heartbeat. xD

But I agree wholeheartedly. The differences are weird and the lack of work on some and overworking on others is very obvious to those who look for them. About ready to pull a soap opera moment and scream in the rain.

[azaleai]

Honestly I'd trade you in a heartbeat. xD

But I agree wholeheartedly. The differences are weird and the lack of work on some and overworking on others is very obvious to those who look for them. About ready to pull a soap opera moment and scream in the rain.

I literally just want to have at least as much detail as the EW textures did, but that's asking too much apparently...

I really don't get the facination with being able to see every single pore, wrinkle and blemish (for male characters at least) in modern games. If it's not a feature I notice on a real life human person standing 5 feet from me, I certainly don't need to see it on a digital person. There's beauty in simplicity, there's merit to leaving things to the imagination; stylised game graphics will always have more charm to me than hyper-realism.

[Liamont]

I guess, the people, who rework the old zones are not the same people who rework the character models. And letting all people rework the models could do more harm than good. Software development does not scale very well with the head count. Adding more people to a software development team can slow it down. Yes, it sounds strange but it is what it is.

This makes sense. Still, I wish that the people they allocated to the character rework were more detail oriented.

They have surely the old models and they can surely compare them.

But the case is more complicated. A character is not only a model, it is a combination of a model, textures and lighting tricks ala normal-/shadow-/parallax maps. And especially the third part is the problematic one. It seems, that the devs are incapable to create correct normal-/shadow-/parallax maps. And the bigger problem is, they were also completely wrong in the pre 7.0 game the whole time. But it seems, that the people got used to it and did not complain about it.

And i do not know the reason why the devs struggle so hard with creating correct normal-/shadow-/parallax maps. Maybe they have some weird restrictions ala "correct normal-/shadow-/parallax maps cost too much performance" or "it will not run on the PS4 because it needs too much memory" or something like that.

And the more frustrating part is, i am active in some nightclub discords and i see modded characters there. And then i wonder, how can it be, that some modders, who create those mods unpaid in their free time, can do so much better work than the FF14 devs. I simply do not get it.

Yes, you can--I've done it myself in Blender. It would be great if there was a way to simply shape one face over the other, but the files are so different that it just doesn't really work to try it. I tried my hand at fixing things myself, but frankly it is way above my skill level to accomplish, as I am very new to learning 3D modeling. It is hard to explain just how radically different the old and new 3D models are. There is no porting the old onto the new, they are fundamentally changed from the ground up. All of the bones are different. All of the weights are different. The texture maps are totally different, not just with some new formats, but even the orientation that the texture maps are laid out on has been changed. It's all different, at ever level of the model. All the old sculpts can do now is serve as a visual reference.

I did run into this too when I was attempting to fix my character's eyebrows. It seemed like the sculpt/mesh (?) of the head was different, which made it so that I had to draw the eyebrows in jagged at the ends to account for the eyebrow ridge morphing it in an odd way. I suppose this may be what is taking so long to fix, if they need to change many parts of the model.