Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Kaziek]

The nostrils feel wider- on all noses. This could be a trick of light, but also could just be tampering with the model itself.

Linking my previous post for screenshot comparison:

Thank you for bringing up the benchmark again, it's actually crazy looking back on it and seeing how much nicer the lighting played with the new faces. I know this isn't a perfect comparison since they changed the time of day for each scene between the benchmarks, but this is with each one looking directly towards the sun.

6.x

Benchmark V1

Live

While there are still things that were definitely off with it (skin looking way too waxy, faces having freckles that didn't before etc.) it was overall much more flattering and felt more faithful to the original lighting. I hope they will reconsider the extremely harsh lighting that they went with in Benchmark v2 and Live, perhaps some sort of middle ground can be achieved.

It's definitely a combination of the lighting and the model being different. Things like the eyes and the lips are absolutely different, and would need to be addressed at the model level. The nose is also a bit different (I really miss the slight bump at the end and the slight curve of the bridge, but that's being super nitpicky) but I think the main issue with it is the lighting. For some reason after the first benchmark they decided to go for this incredibly harsh lighting that ends up making a lot of unflattering shadows, and I believe is the main culprit of faces looking much more doughy and rounded. As you can see in my screenshot of the the V1 benchmark it looks a lot more true to the shape of the old face 1 midlander model.

Hopefully these changes will be both to the models as well as the lighting, because I think both of them are pretty off at the moment and affect many of the faces. Really good points by the way, and all of them things that I have seen other face 1 players feeling the same way about. It seems that most people who have voiced their opinions are in agreement about what went wrong with it.

[FlannFanon]

Lalafell Eye Issues

1. In particular with face 1/101, the permanent/default eye shadow is MUCH more pronounced in 7.x where it only looked like fuller eyelashes pre-dawntrail. Potentially because before it was black and now it's a dark navy making it stand out much more. Because the face already has a Facial Feature option to add even more eye shadow, reducing the default so you are not forced to wear any/such a noticeable amount would be preferable. Makeup should be something opted into, not the default.

2. As a more general issue, the shadow at the top of the iris is much much darker than before causing the shape of the eye to appear different. This is a huge issue for such an important facial feature. Reducing how dark this shadow is or how far it extends down into the iris would restore much of the original appearance and charm.

attached are two Pre-Dawntrail screenshots and two 7.x screenshot for visual comparison:
Pre-DT:



7.x:

[illiere]

My main is a Face 4 Female Veena Viera, and I have literally never been happier with how she looks! I was always iffy about her 6.X appearance, I never truly liked it but it was the best I could get at the time. In my opinion, her new 7.0 face looks miles better than what I had in 6.X. When the 1.1 benchmark came out, I spent a very long time figuring out how I could even further improve her appearance by trying out different options for Face 4 Female Viera in the CC, once I was happy I used a Fantasia in 7.0 to finally have a character whose appearance I love, the team did a great job here. I ask to not change this face drastically or be careful about changes, as I'm now worried that it'll be changed for the worse.
My one request, is that I wouldn't mind if the cupid's bow peaks on Female Viera Face 4 lips were more natural looking, more rounded, and better defined. Right now, the cupid's bow peaks are very square/pointed, and the area around the point seems odd looking, like as if it's misaligned with the colour of the lips (please note, I don't use lipstick for this character). I've attached an image that shows the vanilla 7.0 lips and an edited version that I did quickly in photoshop, hopefully it illustrates the change I'd like to be implemented.



I must also add, I adore the new eye textures! For pretty much everyone. These are exactly the kind of eyes/eye textures that I personally would've implemented and I think they look fantastic! Great job there, in full honesty. I love my Face 4 Female Veena Viera's new eye textures, she has gorgeous eyes now! I also really love how the eye textures look on my alt Face 4 Male Moonkeeper Miqo'te, they suit his personality very well, they have a kind of 'detached''shadowed look to them that I really like. Overall, the eyes, especially with the dynamic lighting, are a big improvement over what we had before.
Unfortunately though, it seems that the eye texture for Face 2 Male Raen Au Ra were changed from the larger pupils in the 1.1 Benchmark to really small pupils in 7.0 Live. I personally greatly preferred the larger pupil eye texture as it made my character look kinder, which is the vibe I wanted for him. Now the 7.0 super tiny pupils make him look more evil, unnatural, and unappealing to me, I don't like them and want the old Male Au Ra Face 2 1.1 Benchmark eye textures back. Or could we please have the larger pupils as an option in CC, let us choose the eye texture?



[2/5]

[illiere]

Now, I did want to list some places for improvement;

- A lot of the races/genders need improvement on their neck seam. The biggest standouts are; Male Elezen, Female Elezen, Male and Female Lalafell, Female Roegadyn, Male Au Ra. These ones are less noticeable but still have visible neckseams; Male Miqo'te, Female Miqo'te, Male Viera, Female Viera.




- Could the diffuse textures for character faces have their resolution increased, please. The diffuse texture is important, and while the normal texture is high res, the diffuse remains low res. This means that Male Miqo'te eyemarks are very blurry and unappealing, it would be nice if this could be improved.




- The body seams on Au Ra need further improvement, and the scales on both their faces and body (especially Female Au Ra body scales!) could use further clean up. There's a noticeable waist seam on Male Au Ra. Female Au Ra Face 1 could use further cleaning up on the face/forehead scales. Male Au Ra Face 1 forehead scales could use improvement, the forehead scales on Male Au Ra Face 2 could be cleaner/clearer.




- Quite a few of the hair meshes have issues. Some of the examples; Male Viera Hair 14 is clipping at the nape of the neck. The G'raha Male Miqo'te hairstyle has broken vertex normals or maybe odd UVs, and clips with itself at the fringe.




- Viera ear textures need further improvement/higher res to better match hair textures. It would also be nice if the hair textures themselves were improved further, but that's low priority.




- Female Roegadyn have issues with their lips and misalignment on all faces. The texturing on their lips seems odd and need to be given another look at, the upper lip/cupid's bow area on Female Roe Faces 1,2, and 3, look like the lip diffuse is misaligned with the lip normal map, Face 4 looks fine though I am unsure if the peaks on the cupid's bow should have a darker colour than the rest of the lip. Please reference screenshots;




- I'm really not sure how much this could be improved without overhauling the body/gear meshes, but the new shadows/lighting system does not play well with the low poly body/gear models. I often have dark lines/shadows on the edges of the polygons/models.




[4/5]

[illiere]

- I'm really not sure how much this could be improved without overhauling the body/gear meshes, but the new shadows/lighting system does not play well with the low poly body/gear models. I often have dark lines/shadows on the edges of the polygons/models.

Continuing on with this;

- Miqo'te ears for both male and female, and on all hairstyles, seem to have a seam. It might be broken vertex normals, or a weird interaction with the new lighting system along the mesh's hard edges that creates these lines.




- I am using the highest settings + DLSS + strongest shadows. Like with previous examples, I do get some weirdness with shadows ingame, see the side of the mouth/lower cheek here;




- The new ear textures for all human (hyur, Roe) and elf (Elezen, Lalafell) ears look fantastic! I love how they all look, thank you very much for the work here! The only issue I have regarding these kinds of ears is that the geometry for Female Elezen's lower half of the ear could be improved, to match the much nicer Male Elezen ears. The Female Elezen ears misaligned geometry to their ear texture was distracting ingame. Both ears in this example are Ear style 1 at 25 length.




- There is artifacting/blockiness on the Female Viera body texture. It's a bit difficult to see, but more noticeable ingame where you can move the character around. I wonder if it's visibility due to my settings/screen, but I did notice the same issues in the 1.1 benchmark and it also affected the body textures for the other female races. The subsurface scattering also seems to create green/red artifacting on face textures, both of these could be decompressed and smoothed.




Link to Imgur Gallery.

[Larirawiel]

- I am using the highest settings + DLSS + strongest shadows. Like with previous examples, I do get some weirdness with shadows ingame, see the side of the mouth/lower cheek here;

The normal- and shadow maps are completely f****d up. I have reported it here:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...e-Elezen-faces

But they closed it as "unsufficient information". And i have no clue why it is "insufficient".



Cheers

[illiere]

We would like to thank everyone for their feedback regarding the graphical update.
The Development team has been carefully reviewing this thread and many others, including bug reports and concerns raised outside of the official forums.

We are currently working on an update based on the feedback provided, as well as preparing to share details about our planned course of action.
As these are undergoing thorough final inspections, we expect to make an announcement in late August.

Thank you all for your patience as we continue fine-tuning the graphical update.

Thank you for your reply, I look forward to seeing how the Graphics Update progresses in the future.
I must add though, people who are happy with the Graphics Update are much less likely to voice their opinion then those who aren't.
I'm someone who has been fervently following the progress behind the Graphics Update, watching every fanfest, every panel, going through all of the races/genders in the benchmarks and trying different options to see how things have changed... You've been incredibly transparent and forward with the information around the update, It's been great to see.
I've been overwhelmingly happy with how everything looks post-7.0, there are some issues that I'll discuss in a following post due to character limit, but generally I like how faces have been recreated for the Graphics Update. Pretty much all player character faces, to me, look either like enhanced versions of their 6.X equivalent or the few changes that, to me, fixed glaring issues with the old 6.X faces (such as poor proportions, poor texturing, fake 'eye shadows', lips on the texture being misaligned to the face mesh, etc.) I, personally, prefer the new 7.0 faces and it would be a crying shame for people who are happy to miss out on 7.0's improvements in favour of overcorrecting in the face of criticism.
I would ask that the developers and artists at Square Enix parse the feedback and review resulting changes very carefully, and be considerate of those who are happy and not vocal about it (as those who are happy will just keep playing like usual) and those who are unhappy. Not everyone will be content with the Graphics Update no matter what is changed, it's possible that any great changes made now will cause a second round of feedback from people who enjoyed how their characters looked in 7.0 (especially if they've already used their free fantasia). Please, to the devs and artists, hold confidence in the work you've done here as it is genuinely great!

[1/5]

[illiere]

Other than that though, I am really happy with how the faces for Face 4 Female Veena Viera, Face 3 Male Raava Viera, Face 2 Male Raen Au Ra, and Face 4 Male Moonkeeper Miqo'te, look ingame!
For other races/genders faces; I personally adore how great the Female Au Ra faces turned out! I wanted to make a Female Au Ra character in the past, but the old 6.X faces always looked very off-putting to me, they looked very doll-like with odd proportions (particularly Face 2 Female Au Ra) and empty eyes. Now, with the new 7.0 assets, they look amazing! I adore how great Faces 1,2, and 3 look, please don't make drastic changes to them! They all look so cute, beautiful, and, personally, much more human to me. I genuinely love how gorgeous each of the Female Au Ra faces look now! Pretty eyes, lips, and well-proportioned faces (thank you for fixing the lip texture being misaligned with the mouth on the mesh on Face 2 Female Au Ra.) I also think Face 4 Female Au Ra looks great, but I can understand people wanting that face to look more severe/harsh/sharp. The new Au Ra scales/horns do look lovely though.
Same for Elezen, Elezen faces all look amazing, especially the Female Faces are greatly improved! I love their new eyes/eye makeup in particular. Pretty much all of the faces look great to me and I find I'm often admiring how good everyone looks ingame, I love how Miqo'te look, I love how Hyurs look, I love how cute Lalafell are, and Hrothgar look amazing (the fur shader is a nice touch!), thank you so much for the work that you've done!
I also really like the skin texture details such as pores and wrinkles, it looks really nice! I love little touches like that, makes the characters feel more human.

[3/5]

[illiere]

- There's artifacts/blocks on a lot of normal maps for both faces, hair, and gear items. I saw that there were some improvements for certain gear items with 7.05, like the lvl 100 DT Warrior AF gear or the lvl 100 DT Red Mage AF gear, and I would like to see the normal map artifacts/blockiness further improved elsewhere.

- Some expressions have a glitchiness to them, where parts of the face 'twitches'. Expressions like /smile, /grin, /wink, /sneer and /content have the lip corners twitch. Expressions like /scared and /ouch have the inner eyebrow area twitch. It seems to be an bug with the animation/rig so hopefully it gets fixed in the future.

Link to IMGUR Gallery for higher res images, hopefully the embedded images work though; https://imgur.com/a/cdvG8ta

Thank you for reading through this, I look forward to seeing how the Graphics Update progresses with both excitement and anxiety.

-

Also, a note to people in this thread. The Graphics Update was always advertised as a rolling update over the 7.X patches. Areas/environments, gear, and NPCs in particular were always stated to be addressed over patches, so if an object or an environment or an NPC isn't updated yet, it's not an issue with the Graphics Update or the Devs being 'Lazy'. It's just not possible to be on a constantly moving platform when developing an active MMORPG, where you need to constantly make new content for players, and also update every part of the game as part of the Graphics Update at once. Have some patience and compassion and understand that things will progress over the course of 7.X, in the case of assets that are yet to be updated.

[5/5]