The Benchmark hair doesn't really look great.

[CellyNebs]

This applies to the old and new benchmark. It looks like it was thrown into an upscale program and given no extra thought. It needs some work. There's artifacts on every hair, not even the new hairstyle is spared, and the fringes of the hairs' transparency hides the eyebrow texture. There's also transparent artifacts on the edges of hair that can be seen by moving the camera slightly. I'd really hoped something would've changed. Stark highlights like this don't have an issue in the current patch, nor do the eyebrows clash with the hair. Face paints were untouched, too. All of them from the looks of it.

[Kathryn]

I've heard complaints but this is definitely a non complaint, you can only see these "artifacts" if you snippit or screenshot and zoom in, you cannot see these little things on the char creator unless you're looking for it and even then it looks SO much better than the current version of hair in game.

[CellyNebs]

The middle pic is not zoomed in all the way and it's still clear that there's artifacting. Here's a full screen capture so you can all see for yourself that it's noticeable at a normal zoom level. Saying not to zoom in and look for stuff is kind of reductive when people have been posting about other tiny changes.

[Gyson]

I feel some of the hairstyles do have issues. I'm still really disappointed with how my character turned out in the updated benchmark. It just doesn't look like the same character to me, nor does it look like an improvement.



Left is Endwalker, Right is Dawntrail. There are several problems with the updated version of my character that bother me, but since we're talking about hair I'll stick to that.

The hair, while more detailed when zoomed in extremely close, seems much less detailed when viewed from any reasonable distance. I believe this is due to the lack of shading that is now present in the hair, causing it to look very flat.

Two-tone colors no longer blend nearly as well as they used to, and for the lighter color I am using the darkest shade available. I can not make it darker without switching to a different color entirely. Again, this seems to be a problem with lost shading or variance in its color, so rather than each tone having areas that are slightly lighter and slightly darker and allowing the sections to blend together better, each section now appears separate and distinct (which is not good when it's supposed to be a blend).

I have not seen these issue on all hairstyles, so it seems to be a problem with this particular hairstyle.

[CellyNebs]

I have not seen these issue on all hairstyles, so it seems to be a problem with this particular hairstyle.

The blockiness on the highlights is definitely less noticeable on different hairstyles and lower contrast colors (like yours, for example) but seeing as these are player character options, all possible configurations should just look good. I realize that it's virtually impossible for a team to test every single one, but the extremes at least should be tested (i.e. high contrasting colors). With how close launch is, it makes me worry that I'll have to end up making a change to something I've done on this character for a while now. It doesn't help that we can't test the Modern Aesthetics styles so I won't have any idea how the Y'shtola hair looks until I wade through the login queue.