Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[nattherat]

The "hyurification" is certainly real. I can understand why there might be confusion from players who don't look at the meshes, but I did because I wanted to verify what I was seeing in game. Just to clear up confusion but also to point out these fundamental issues further:


Here's a very direct comparison, orthographic view. I won't comment on the ears or eyes here because the shape keys haven't been set the same on both of them. It's very clear to see that the middle of a Lalafell face is now a pinched/squished in hyur face, same with the lips. I'd be willing to bet actual money this is identical across all races.


A close-up of the DT mesh, really zeroing in on that nose and lips. There's 101 other problems imho, including issues I didn't mention like my freckles being all but invisible now, but truly the biggest offending thing is this whole using a hyur mesh as a universal base. You can even see where the eye corner leading to the bridge of the nose, which would be a small area on a hyur, is really stretched on a lalafell. That hyur mesh is struggling on other species. In general the whole T-zone, nose, and mouth are suffering severely. The original mesh, whilst lower poly, was also significantly tidier and better shaped for lalafell specifically.


In case the wireframe is too much info to visually-parse, here's a draw over highlighting exactly how the face is being pinched vs the old mesh. If somebody feels they still can't see the issues, then... I'm not sure what to say. The mesh itself is damning proof, imho. Again, pretty sure this will be the same across other races too.

This is why my lalafellin nose no longer exists and has been completely replaced with a misshapen hyur nose. It's as though a simple inflate/deflate tool has been used on them in the 3D software without much consideration, which leads to... kind of amateur excessive polys around those areas. You can't one-size-fits-all different species. Again, sorry, I'm really trying to remain reasonable and calm, I just genuinely feel this was unacceptable to release.

I hope this shows that this isn't an actual faithful upscale of Lalafellin head. The loops around the lips and the nose are entirely different, because they were built for hyurs, not for lalafell.

[GreenLeafy]

I need to check all of my characters for the brow not lining up with the brow ridge. I was saying the other day that I'd just realised it was happening on my face-4 male Miqo'te but maybe it's widespread. There was definitely someone a few pages back who also had the eye socket shadow creeping above the eyebrow line, and IIRC that was a female Highlander.

Don't have screenshots on hand rn but this issue is very much a problem. I noticed it on my Face 1 miqo aswell. Depending on if I have a hat on or off my fringe also goes infront or behind the facewear but I can't tell if that's the glasses moving or my fringe lol. Friend has facewear also sit funky on his female miqo.

[GreenLeafy]

The "hyurification" is certainly real.

This approach would fall in line with that I've seen for the diffuse maps for everyone's eyes aswell. I don't have the diffuse maps from pre-DT but every single one in DT is literally the same one for everyone with just minor tweaks of value (or pupil shape for miqo/lalas). Which is what most likely led to something like au'ras losing their smaller pupil because they now have an identical diffuse map with the rest. Whoever was working on doing the update for characters was really trying to cut as many corners as possible , which in of itself isn't a terrible thing to do, but it was just executed so poorly and had literally no consideration for the finer details that made the racial differences what they really are.

[nattherat]

This approach would fall in line with that I've seen for the diffuse maps for everyone's eyes aswell. I don't have the diffuse maps from pre-DT but every single one in DT is literally the same one for everyone with just minor tweaks of value (or pupil shape for miqo/lalas). Which is what most likely led to something like au'ras losing their smaller pupil because they now have an identical diffuse map with the rest. Whoever was working on doing the update for characters was really trying to cut as many corners as possible , which in of itself isn't a terrible thing to do, but it was just executed so poorly and had literally no consideration for the finer details that made the racial differences what they really are.

Absolutely, I'm really glad for the players who have explained the technical side of things in this thread despite there sometimes being pushback/claims that these are imagined/subjective, that's what inspired me to go look at the meshes and textures and see for myself too. I wanted to be certain of the criticisms I had and why they were happening.

I understand efficiency in the workplace is important, and I understand why on paper this would have seemed like an awesome idea. Having one universal base mesh to cut your work down to a fraction? Sounds great! But universal only works if everything using that universal mesh is fundamentally the same in the first place. Actually making a Lalafell, Hrothgar, and Roegadyn all use a Hyur mesh is beyond absurd. It's no longer optimised if it causes so many issues that they now have to do their second major revision to the graphics - and potentially third+, depending on the results of the late August revision. That's now significantly less efficient than if they'd made a bespoke mesh per race to start with. Literally doing a lazy subdivide on the original lalafell mesh, whilst would need cleaning up, would have produced better visual results that more players would have been happy with because it would have structurally remained lalafell. (It also would have saved them time. I can't imagine what a pain it must be to first try and mash a hyur face into something as extreme as a lalafell, and then try and force the shape keys into the same as old shape keys. This is why everyone's noticing their mouths/noses/eyebrows/cheeks/etc are different. Basically this has made way more work for the dev team than just doing bespoke meshes to start with.)

[Argantaelle]

I'd be willing to bet actual money this is identical across all races.

Your post pretty much explains everything, thank you.

P.S. I'm kind of curious about the fourth male Au Ra face. So far, it has changed very little (fundamentally, I'm not talking about lighting or overall increased smoothness). It even retained the original, non-standard mouth shape. I have a feeling they kind of forgot about it, and maybe it still has the same face structure as before DT.

P.S.S. ...and then I suddenly realised that I would never get my character back. If they hyurificated everything, it might take too much work to adjust the shapes according to the original. Also, the inevitable adjustments defile the very idea of standardisation, because in the end, the meshes might as well be unique for each race.

The future seems to be rather grim.

[CuteBucket]

Guess I'll bang some pots and pans in this thread too. I'm going to cross post it on the JP forums just to try and get it out there. It took me a long time to gather and edit together all the pictures, because frankly, logging in on my Au Ra alt just makes me sad right now. She doesn't look like herself anymore and it's a huge bummer.

The image on the left is from a series of poses in a studio I took during 6.x to give to artists for when I commissioned them for artwork of my character. Because I wanted it to be high quality for the artists, I edited the colors a little bit and cleaned up the detail of her hair and scales, but the shape of her face is not changed. I tried to get the lighting as similar as I could in 7.x, but it's not quite the same. But this is less about the colors and more about the shape of the 3D model. Sorry if these files are huge. I wanted to show as much detail as possible.


Endwalker/6.x is on the left, Dawntrail/7.x on the right.

[CuteBucket]

I used an art program to trace over the image to better see some of the differences.


These are the differences that stand out to me:
- Eyebrows are thicker and more arched in 6.x, and are slightly flatter and much more thin in 7.x.
- The shape of the top eyelid is is more angular in 6.x while it is smooth and rounded in 7.x.
- The pupil is smaller in 6.x which makes her look awake and alert. The pupil is bigger in 7.x which makes her look tired.
- The darkness of the eye makeup has been lightened in 7.x and is much less prominent than in 6.x.
- The eyeshadow on the lower eyelid is a sharper line in 7.x while it is more blended in 6.x.
- The eyes are larger in 7.x, which changes the proportions of her face and makes her look more child-like. Part of why I liked face 3 was because I though she looked more like a young woman than a teenage girl. I liked her maturity. But now with the bigger eyes the proportions make her look too young.
- The eye color has changed and isn't due to different lighting. She no longer has her seafoam green limbal ring in her eyes.
- Her nose is okay. The nostrils may be very slightly further apart in 7.x, but overall I think the nose looks fine.
- The lips going from 6.x to 7.x changed a lot. The top lip has its peaks moved closer together in 7.x and has lost a lot of the curve along the edges.
- The middle line of her mouth use to make a cute shape, like :} but now it's just a flat line like :|
- The bottom lip is full and rounded in 6.x, but its smaller and less round in 7.x.
- She went from wearing glossy lipstick to matte lipstick.
- The color of the horns and scales went from warm toned to cold toned. The darkness on her scales looks less like shadow and more like she has dirt stuck to her. It gives me an icky feeling like I need to scrub her in the bath when I look too close.

The thing I care about most is the lips and eyes.

These are what make her look like herself. I fell in love with the beautiful lips on face 3 and now they are gone! These were her charm points! I miss my cute little lizzer so much

[Louhikko]

Watching a lot of these comparison images, from midlander to lalafell and elezen, it seems for some reason, they decided to position the mouths higher up on the models...
I don't see the reason for such a weird change.

I know some people may not agree with me here because they dislike their characters changing but my bigger issue with midlander and elezen is that most of the noses are too high up/too short leaving an unnecessarily big gap between the mouth and the nose and I always saw this as a product of the models being so old (remember older races like hyur are like decade old at this point) either forcing the modelers to basically create character with (imo) bad anatomy due to technical limitations or the modelers at the time just not being up to task and I hoped they would fix these anatomy issues in the update.

Not just noses as well but a lot of the chins are kinda tucked in weirdly and especially elezens' body proportions are pretty horrific. I know people meme elezen necks but they got more issues with things like the shoulders being sort of detached from the torso and the upper chest being too wide, the head being too small for the bodies overall, as well as other small stuff, especially when the concept art actually had proper accurate proportions.

I think the raising of the lips was a half-hearted attempt to slighly fix the anatomy and proportions without fully commiting to it.

My point is that personally I would've been fine with them altering the models more radically for the sake of objectively fixing past issues with anatomy and proportions even if it came at the cost of altering the characters appearance but I also know it's not a very popular opinion here and I understand it. I think part of the dissatisfaction is due to the fact that they're trying to do both at the same time making things look even more jarring.

[Khryseis_Astra]

Here's a very direct comparison, orthographic view. I won't comment on the ears or eyes here because the shape keys haven't been set the same on both of them. It's very clear to see that the middle of a Lalafell face is now a pinched/squished in hyur face, same with the lips. I'd be willing to bet actual money this is identical across all races.

This illustrates exactly what I was having trouble putting into words: how everything looks squished in towards a central point, making all the features look off. The odd thing is, if it’s Hyurs that are the base model, why are so many of their faces just as wrong? lol You would think if they were the master template, they would all look more or less unchanged.

I wonder if that’s why, despite there being a few issues on my Lala I’d still like to see fixed, that Lalas don’t seem to have as many problems as some of the races, just due to the sheer effort of what they had to do here!

[nattherat]

I always saw this as a product of the models being so old (remember older races like hyur are like decade old at this point) either forcing the modelers to basically create character with (imo) bad anatomy due to technical limitations or the modelers at the time just not being up to task and I hoped they would fix these anatomy issues in the update.

I won't go on about it, but this definitely wasn't a product of the models being old - it isn't as though people couldn't model humans ten years ago. It was deliberate stylistic choice, it's very reminiscent of things like the Tactics series illustrations, with the exaggerated bodies and poses. Erasing the art style erases the identity of the game, it's the age-old graphics =/= aesthetics. If you don't care for the stylisation, that's totally fine of course.

The odd thing is, if it’s Hyurs that are the base model, why are so many of their faces just as wrong? lol You would think if they were the master template, they would all look more or less unchanged.

Because Hyur got a new mesh too, it just happens that their new mesh is what everyone else's new mesh is based on. So everyone got changed, including Hyur, which is why Hyur players are (rightfully) upset too.