Dawntrail Graphic Update Feedback - Skin translucency is overtuned

[Zen_Zaal]

The new skin under various lighting conditions act more like candles next to a bright light than natural skin and should be addressed. It causes an unnatural waxy look to most skins and I believe also results in a lot of lost texture/color in the face leading to characters that look very different than they used to be.

I get that the translucency exists to get that SSS effect to come through, but 95% of the body isn't as translucent as ear flesh, especially in diffuse lighting. Other materials end up reacting to light properly in the benchmark because of this, while the skin has that uncanny glow to it in relation to everything else. It's easiest to notice in the shadows like here where there's glow in places that shouldn't exist and changing the gamma does nothing to alleviate the lighting problems:










Other examples of stronger local colors in EW vs. DT overly translucent skin







Two scales for reference. We are at the left in terms of light bleed/translucency/sss in EW and way too far to the right in DT.



Another example of too much light bleed.



Slightly better in the benchmark, but it still has its issues. First off skin doesn't get to those levels of orange saturation naturally under those lighting conditions, and combined with the gloss on the character it gives it that waxy look. There's also an absence of pigment on the face that skin is supposed to have as well. As for the chin you only see that kind of light to saturated orange to shadow when the material is translucent/made of wax or if you are shining a strong light right through that area. Here it's just a normal sunny day we should be seeing more skin pigment and less glow from the blood (or wax) underneath. In shadow, a lot of facial features end up coming out flat without that local coloring.






Here the translucency non-existent for these characters and end up looking pretty decent because of it, especially the texture of the big boy here. If they can balance the look of the skin a little more toward this less translucent stronger local texture look, I think a lot of issues with other facial features will be addressed.



Here's some other references to the waxy effect in reality with celebrities and their wax figures. Note the uniform skin tones and oily shine, very much what we are seeing in DT.


It's the same problem Skyrim had when it went from LE to SE when they added SSS, but I hope it's fixed here or I'll never toggle my helmet off ever again.

[eohippus]

thank you for providing a breakdown explaining this! the skin just looked really "off" to me and the lighting looked strange, but I didn't know how to put it into words that made sense. it does especially weird things to darker skin tones, contributing to what seems to be an overall change in shades available to people (I know multiple people who have had to adjust their character's skin tone to be darker to match what it looked like before, and others who already had the darkest options who are now upset because their characters have noticeably different undertones or are reading as markedly lighter in the benchmark.)

[Zen_Zaal]

thank you for providing a breakdown explaining this! the skin just looked really "off" to me and the lighting looked strange, but I didn't know how to put it into words that made sense. it does especially weird things to darker skin tones, contributing to what seems to be an overall change in shades available to people (I know multiple people who have had to adjust their character's skin tone to be darker to match what it looked like before, and others who already had the darkest options who are now upset because their characters have noticeably different undertones or are reading as markedly lighter in the benchmark.)

No problem. Yeah the game seem to treat skin tone weirdly with their new graphics, you're changing the overall color of the waxy flesh only, and skin pigmentation is just complete absent so the SSS just overpowers any changes you make leading to a characters being lighter than intended.

[Mirikh]

Thanks so much for providing this feedback with specifics!

[Rueby]

Thank you for this, I hope SE sees this and makes amendments if possible...

[BipedalAnimeSkull]

First of, thank you for this detailed breakdown.
Is this why the character skin looks weirdly shiny? They look like they got oiled throughout their body, and that's one of the many things that I hate in modern Korean MMOs where their characters' skin is shiny as hell

[mallleable]

Good post. Very doable fix.

Like say, the SSS setting is set to 0.5 currently then knocking it back to like 0.4 or even 0.3 would go a long way.

[decomposer]

Totally agree with what's said here. It reminds me of what happens when various types of resin are used in the creation of dolls, for example. In this case, this doll-maker manufacturer discontinued this resin type because people complained about it looking cheaper despite being more technically impressive. Which is how I feel about the benchmark.



I think that the updated skin texture combined with the way the lighting is set to diffuse through it while also heavily reflecting against it made for a really terrible combination.

Thank you for the breakdown! This, to me, seems like an easy fix if they get to it quickly. I will gladly sacrifice the elezen ear subsurface scattering if it means the faces aren't totally flattened (but also made wet?)

[aulierre]

Well said. The shiny skin really sticks out on darker skin tones, too, especially because the shine is a pure, cold white. The shine needs to be a slightly warmer (or cooler) color on warmer/cooler darker skin tones to look less jarring.

[ValG]

Thank you for taking the time to illustrate this. Hope this helps to solve the issue of the oily/waxy skin.