Dawntrail Benchmark & Model Changes Feedback

[persephius]

Hello everyone (and hopefully devs),

I just wanted to give my own personal feedback about the changes that have been made to M Viera as it's the character model I mainly play as. If people want to turn this into a thread and also give their own feedback (constructive criticism please) about other races and genders that would be wonderful as well!

(This will be a 3 part post, since there's a character limit. Please keep reading below the initial post for the continuation.)

For reference, here's what my character currently looks like in 6.58 with neutral shaders.



This is what the same character loaded into the Benchmark Character Creator looks like (with very similar but not the exact same shaders due to a different version of ReShade).



First, the positive: I do think that the face texture change for M Viera itself is decent. I have seen some of the texture changes for some of the other races and by comparison I think M Viera is subtle enough while giving good texture and perception of pores without looking papery, but at the same time the skin overall still trends with the rest of the races in looking waxy instead of like skin. This looks better in direct sunlight than darker lighting. There also seems to be a little more texture to the lips as well, with realistic small creases in the lips and especially in the lower lip that is noticeable in direct light. This looks better too.

Also, the teeth/inside of mouths are fantastic. The teeth have clear dimension now and each tooth has a distinct appearance, and there's actually a tongue now! This is a super positive change in my mind.



Additionally, the clothes are much higher resolution than they were, and the textures are a big improvement.




However, I'm afraid the rest of my feedback will be mostly constructive criticism.

The model viewed from afar, while looking higher resolution in direct sunlight, has a couple of major issues.



The irises and pupils no longer have a noticeable shine, and it makes them look lifeless and doll-like (not in a good way). You have to zoom in pretty close to see multiple small specks of light reflecting in their eyes and it still makes them appear lifeless even close up. Even in direct light this eyeshine does not appear any bigger, whereas eyes in real life would have a much bigger and brighter reflection. I think the devs were going for more realism here, but ultimately it's not quite there and just makes the model look worse. A bigger dot of eyeshine in their eyes especially over the darker parts like the pupil would restore the life and make them look lucid again.

[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.

[persephius]

And lastly, the scar definition is a lot worse now than it used to be. Before it had dimension and texture. Now it just looks drawn on, and it also extends past the lower lash line, which looks a little unnatural as there's no scarring or disruption of the lashes where it intersects on the actual lash line. This too also looked fine before.

I say this in good faith, but the model looks overall much, much worse than it did. If you were viewing them side by side and not told which is the before or after, it's easy to assume the 7.0 update was the before and the current 6.58 model is the improved version. I really do hope sufficient improvements can be made before implementation of the new expansion, or allow us to opt out of the new visual update, because as of right now, I don't want to play the new expansion if it's going to look like this. The improvements to resolution are not at all worth it at the cost of the current appearance which is full of life, in my opinion. I don't recognize my WoL at all.

The new M Viera model and the eyes in general across race models look so lifeless, and the shadows and lighting make the characters somehow look so much less defined than they were despite being much higher resolution, on top of just changing a lot of little features to make things look worse when they looked great as they were.

But I'm praying it will be fixed soon with our feedback, and I encourage everyone to leave their own feedback so the devs can consider the constructive criticism and implement improvements. Thank you for reading!

[SaberEx]

did you turn off your shader?

[persephius]

did you turn off your shader?

As stated in my main post, the screenshots I took are with shaders on. It tangibly doesn't make any difference to the criticism I gave, as the problems are with the actual textures of the game and transparency of the textures in game, not the colors of the shaders. Here is the same model with shaders turned off for 6.58 and the Benchmark 7.0. All of the problems mentioned are still there.