Benchmark - Face 1 Male Miqo'te Feedback

[animancer]

Just wanted to input some feedback I personally have when it comes to my observations with the updated benchmark! I think the updates have been wonderful.

I play a character with darker blue-grey skintone (a Keeper miqo'te) which I know isn't often seen, so I thought I'd make some personal feedback notes. I'll also include some notes for the actual human skintones (i.e., dark brown) for comparison! Most of my observations are only going to be about male keeper face 1 to keep my notes very specific, but if anyone has noticed other similarities with other races/faces, I'd be interested to know if anyone has them too!

Overall: I'm very excited with the changes from the previous version we saw! I'm especially happy with how the lighting changes have even further impacted his visibility in darker areas or shadow. A lot of what I'm observing are smaller details. I very much do not want to have my feedback come across as hostile or negative either, and rather personal observations and constructive notes. I really like the changes, and I think my Warrior of Light looks fantastic and love him a lot!

For clarity: My benchmark screenshots were done with maximum possible settings and most everything on default. Gamma is at 40 for both the base game and the Benchmark. Apologies if my screenshots are too big as well, I didn't want to risk loosing too much detail with resizing the image!

Some of the observations I had was with default face 1 male miqo'te:

• On combinations that have your character's skintone and hair colour are similar in tone, the eyebrows often seem to be very hard to see.
• I added a comparison screenshot with three different versions using the same settings on the character creator, just with different skin tones and one with a different hair colour to show how the equivalent with pale skin with white hair looks.

I added a comparison screenshot with three different versions using the same settings on the character creator, just with different skin tones and one with a different hair colour to show how the equivalent with pale skin with white hair looks.



The dark grey-blue for the skin for my WoL is using the RGB values of 63, 67, 77 - the second last from left to right, and the 11th row down from the top. The dark brown is 74, 46, 33 - or the furthest on the bottom right of the Keeper options available. The pale is 212, 190, 183 - or, the same 11th row as his current skin tone, simply the palest option all the way to the left.

[animancer]

• I feel like the brows being a lot harder to see is definitely more noticeable on darker skin tones. My WoL doesn't use the darkest option for the row as well. The dark grey, blueish tone and dark brown skin tones both share this issue in my opinion!
• Even with a pale skin and pale hair, I find the shadow for the eye socket helps highlight the lighter brows. Which is good for visibility if you have that combination!
• In comparison, darker hair tones often have the general misfortune of being hard to see when the skin tone is darker.</li><li>Naturally, it's pretty easy to see light hair on darker skin, and darker hair on lighter skin because of the differences in values!
• Looking at the dark hair on dark skin again, while I find it's easier to see the brow up close or when under a bright light: it gets lost when zooming out or in any sort of medium light. (Which makes it look as though he has no eyebrows at times. I'm sorry to my WoL, you actually do! )

Here's a closeup, which has the latest Benchmark at the top, and the current game at the bottom!

• The black hair tone (as I am currently using the darkest possible black for both) overall seems to be a bit brighter in the new benchmark.
• In my opinion, this works better for the strands of hair on the head and makes it look more natural, but I think the brow matches the skin tone, it being lightened has contributed to causing some of the issues with the display of the brows!

• The eyebrows for face 1 also seem to be quite a bit more faded overall regardless of what colour the hair is. This seems to be the case even with more visible combinations. They were always not the same as (for example) face 4 for sure, I know that they were already quite a bit more faded overall in comparison. I'm fine with this as a whole! I wouldn't want all features to get homogenized and made the same after all.
• Keeping the charm of all the unique aspects of every face is really important to me. However, I think it was made a bit too faded on this version!

• The shape and size of them are vastly improved, but I think they were made to appear a bit too thin or faded on the face, which has caused these issues when combined with the slightly lighter values in the new for dark hair.
• It makes it difficult, because it unfortunately looks fine on high contrast variations and with characters that have pale skin... but has issues for characters with dark skin. (Or, if you've noticed this too even with a higher contrast option, let me know!)

While I am an artist, I'm not personally experienced with 3D assets - but this reminds me of when works of art lose visual clarity because the values and tones of the colours in it do not have enough contrast.

[animancer]

Adding some further screenshots of my character in the Benchmark so that I don't only share character creator examples, and people can see it in the natural environments. One with the environment being lighter, and the other where he is in darker shadows:





The face and overall details being this visible when not in the previously perfect light now at this point has been a wish for a very long time for me. I'm ecstatic about how much the lighting and highlights have been improved to help that with this updates!

Here's an example of a basic edit I personally made using CSP (Clip Studio Paint, an art program) that shows a sample comparison of how the eyebrows could be made slightly more visible to increase the overall visual clarity on darker skin tones, even with darker hair.

• I didn't want the eyebrows to be too dark and not match with the hair, and chose to not also edit the values on the hair. I wanted to retain the visual identity of how they currently are as best as I could, while making them properly visible for a character with darker skin!
• I did my best to go along the Benchmark's outline of the existing brow and only create a slightly more visible look for them. I do not want to alter them to look unlike the originals!

My goal was more about a small adjustment that will make it so that face 4 male miqo'te characters regardless of their current hair, skin tone, and more can properly see their features. I know a big focus of the Graphical Updates was centered around making darker skinned characters overall work better with the lighting and presentations in the game compared to how they previously were. I think altering small details like these are absolutely in line with that, because I want all WoL's to be able to be able to see themselves properly! And their eyebrows.



Thank you to anyone who reads this post! I can't believe I just spent a long time talking about eyebrows, among other things.

Again, I want to really mention that I am extremely happy with the changes that have been implemented when comparing both current game graphics to the original, as well as the original Benchmark release to the current 1.1 version. I personally do not have dark skin, but for my character, and even more importantly for my friends, players, and WoLs who do; who have seen these changes and improvements and been unable to hide their excitement or joy at the improvements - I figured I would do my best to provide feedback that might be noteworthy! Even if it is on something so small. Hopefully this post also makes sense too. I've been typing it out for the better part of an hour.

I hope everyone enjoys their journeys into Dawntrail! And especially thank you developers and the makers of FFXIV working so hard! <3

[TheVegetable]

I agree about the eyebrows. Even on my character, whose skin and hair colours are very different from each other, the eyebrows are noticeably less visible (particularly in certain lighting conditions). If anything, I think the old eyebrows were perhaps a bit more subtle than they should've been.

also because I can't shut up about it, they made some big changes to the mouth/lips of face 1 that are really egregious for certain characters and I really hope they fix that (the lower lip especially), particularly when the lip and skin colours contrast each other.

[Aco505]

We do need eyebrow thickness and shape options to be separate. Face 1 thickest option is still quite thin.

I feel like dark skin tones, and particularly keeper specific ones, help a lot in "hiding" some of the woes but create others in return. For instance, the low textures found on the sides of the face (see here) and below the eyes seem to hide well thanks to the skin color.