Dawntrail Benchmark & Model Changes Feedback

[persephius]

Moving onto the lashes: I use the thicker lash setting on M Viera for my WoL and it has been thinned considerably. Both the lashes themselves and the lash line have been dramatically thinned, and for people who choose to give their WoLs thicker lashes this is really counterintuitive.

Similarly, the eyebrows have also been dramatically thinned, and they also appear to be raised a bit. If the devs want to add an option for players to choose a thinner brow, that's totally fine with me, but all of the brow options have been thinned in a way that doesn't look good, and overall weakens the structure of the face. To be honest, in tandem with changes to the eyes, it gives them a really blank look of apathy, like a doll with no focused vision. It doesn't look like they're conscious.

Shadows and lighting are a major issue in the current graphics update. While the shadows themselves no longer cut across textures in harsh, blocky lines...



...the characters look completely washed out of realistic shadows falling on the face and skin. Someone with more knowledge of how 3D models work pointed out this had to do with the skin translucency being overtuned and causing this problem, and I agreed with their post a lot. Shadows are sometimes harsh on the face, and they have to be to look realistic. Shadowing is also a gradient, so for all of the shadowed skin to be one flat tone looks really uncanny. I'll defer to my betters who have given more in-depth explanations about how lighting should work as they give great analyses about what's going wrong now on the models.

The lips for many races have been flattened, and the same is true of M Viera. As another person commented, depth of the tubercles has been flattened and the overall shape of the lips, which were very charming before, now has no personality. Furthermore, any natural lip color on M Viera before has been turned into a lipstick, even on the light setting.



The darkening of the bunny nose also is not particularly flattering in my opinion, but it's one of the less severe issues. The nose was good the way it was, imo.

The beauty mark just under the left eye has been changed to a weird line, which I think wasn't intentional, but it's worth mentioning it anyway. I also think the beauty mark is fine as is and needs no changing.



The eyes also look completely flat from the side now, especially without the eyeshine. This looks especially egregious at certain angles.