Updated benchmark

[Astronis]

I totally agree with you, they have achieved to truly upgrade the characters and they did a pretty good job keeping the original ideas/shapes polygon-wise. (The only exception might be some mouths, but I don't think that could be easily fixed or should be fixed in some cases.)
At least on my female highlander it is true and they are one of the more problematic races here I think - yes, she felt extremely off for me at first (it was the reason to join the forums actually), but I've got out the ruler and her features anatomically are extremely close to the original.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6472664

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All in all, I could recommend sitting down and comparing the faces in minute details, it was what made me accept a lot of differences, including the mouth. - When I compared the original with the benchmark, I asked myself: 'If I was the artist, what would I have done?' There are a lot of really minor differences, which makes the character look off, but if I was sitting next to the artist, I would have agreed to commit to them - upgrade the nose, yes, giving eyebrow definition, yes, define the texture at the corners of the mouth, yes, define the creases to look more dimensional, yes, etc...
Of course, there will be changes, but in the end, you can compare the original and tweak the textures to feel more similar. - And I do think we should only look at the characters to see what defines the face, what improves upon it and what is important to change to get closer to that definition. Not necessarily to achieve the same, but to get closer to it if needed.

I saw your post originally and thought you did a very fair deep-dive on the small differences. I'm glad doing that helped you accept the differences. Yeah, they do look different to us, but of course the devs were never, ever going to make a higher-poly model look identical to a low-poly model. It would defeat the purpose! Why even bother updating the model at that point? And you are right, the lighting change *really* affects how we perceive our characters.

The first go round there were 100% a good few things that needed to be addressed. Big things like some wonky mouth scaling that made Lalafel teeth completely change shape to quite subtle things, like the height and angle of my Highlander's brow ridge. Those things were fixed and they needed to be. Now...most of the differences people are pointing out are extremely subtle. They exist! People aren't making them up. But to keep on spending dev time addressing them...I just don't think it's necessary outside a very few things. Everyone's WoLs look great and it's so obvious the devs took great care in trying to preserve the original appearances as much as was within their abilities while still upgrading the models and textures and lighting.