Probably should, I was a bit lazy there. But that's not going to change the face structure, which is the main issue.
That maybe true. But here's my question: the 'new' face was the changed default. But did you try to change it back to what you had or is the picture you are displaying just the immediate "default reset" when you first went in there? Because if you have actually gone in to customize and attempt to recreate what you had and this is the best you could come up with then I agree: this would be epicfail.
However, if this is just the face that the system defaulted to then it makes sense as it resets itself in preparation for your new customization. It still isn't right as any alteration you make should be from the starting point of your existing look. But, even so - the true question here is: is that new face the best you could do in actually recreating your look, or not?
Thanks for your picture comparison. It's helpful to see where the system stands right now, though I would also remind everyone it's all still a work-in-progress and will (hopefully) get a lot better.
IT was just the initial default changeover, but I did try to fix it up a bit after I took the screenshot, but couldn't get my character to look anything like himself, and the face structure didn't really get any better there seems to be an all-round lack of chin for men. I'll have another go later and see what the best I can get with higher graphics is then post a screenshot.
Also yeah work-in progress, and I'm hoping for some major improvements before it goes live, but my initial reactions is leaving me with a feeling of dread.
Male models need more chin, I agree, I'd like to see more square jaws. For now they look a bit weak and childish.
As I've said to a few people elsewhere, the new character facial models tend to have a sort of anime quality to them. and if anime has anything, it's pointy chins, rather than strong wide ones. Frankly, I like looking at big beefy men. I'd much rather have some giant hairy brute than an androgynous prettyboy.
All right, things are getting better. I had another try, and with a pleasant surprise I notice tiefling males now have a lot more option, more than 1 face shape for starters.
I tried editing kiasan again, but no matter what I did he still looked deformed, but since there were new faces, I tried recreating him from scratch as best I could, this is what I got.
Old screenshot
New one..
That looks a lot better now, though still a lot of room for improvement, there's still a lack of chin.. I had to max out the chin width and chin length sliders. And picked the head shape with the most square jaw... considering that's literally as big as chins get, its quite lacking in chin.
but I'm seeing improvements, and hopefully it will keep improving.
Yeah I was playing with the Tiefling character creation last night and you can indeed have nice faces, mine ended up looking basically the same as your last pic.
Yeah I was playing with the Tiefling character creation last night and you can indeed have nice faces, mine ended up looking basically the same as your last pic.
yeah that's been a recent thing, a few days ago there was only 1 choice for tiefling faces, which looked like the one in the first screenshot. But seeing things getting better and better is leaving me feeling positive about it all. which is good. Still a fair way to go before I could say I'm happy with it, but it is just a work in progress at the moment.
I'm hoping the pouty lips wont be a necessity by the time mod 3 is released.
And I can't say it enough, I really would love to have some facial hair choices for tiefling men, would go a long way to stopping them from all looking so samey. That, and my character is supposed to be rugged, stubble would complete his look.
Yeah, so far I've managed to get decent faces for most races, even though many times it's just 1 good face and the rest is horrible. The only race I can't get a good face on is female elves, they all look horrible and their eyes are HUGE and the faces too wide or too short. I want some more realistic options with smaller eyes and longer faces.
I can understand that elves aren't human and thus not bound to the same levels of realism, but seriously, the only types of creatures with eyes that large are cave dwelling or nocturnal mammals, like fruit bats and a few varieties of lemurs. Last I checked, female elves weren't supposed to be lemurs.
Not to mention the old hairs that are close to the face, the gigantic eyes bulge out.
Unfortunately for whatever idiot reason the game doesn't save screenshots for me while in the Tower of Alteration, so my results from playing with my characters last night weren't actually saved, so I'll have to do it again when I'm not about to leave, but... Aye carumba. Only my Halfling comes through even remotely decently, and even then she looks nothing like herself. My other chars are all elves/half-elves/drow, and... Ugh. The defaults that come through are horrific, and even the fixes are bad and look nothing like them. My half-elf's ears STILL don't touch his head under the new faces, and my male woodelves' hair no longer actually connects to their head. It's still disgusting.
I didn't say "ALL" the problems, I never made a tiefling female so I have no idea how they were before. I said MOST of the problems. For most races males are lacking some chin and more square jaws, and many females have just HUGE eyes, specially female elves.
True, you said "most", my bad. Female elves had huge eyes before, and I find them not so bad in the new version (at least in comparison). And I admit the lack of chins/jaws is the biggest problem for most of the male chars, however, there are other things, like the overall manga-like look of the new faces, not sure where it comes exactly, greasy skin, the eyes, clipping, etc. I'd say whoever created it, watched 1 anime too many (tho as someone mentioned before, real anime faces are not that ugly).
True, you said "most", my bad. Female elves had huge eyes before, and I find them not so bad in the new version (at least in comparison). And I admit the lack of chins/jaws is the biggest problem for most of the male chars, however, there are other things, like the overall manga-like look of the new faces, not sure where it comes exactly, greasy skin, the eyes, clipping, etc. I'd say whoever created it, watched 1 anime too many (tho as someone mentioned before, real anime faces are not that ugly).
real anime faces are that ugly. its the uncanny vally. they work in anime because that's the setting, but if you seen someone walking down the street in real life with the facial proportions of an anime character you'd probably be horrified. This game is not an anime, therefor that style of disproportionate faces looks out of place and unappealing.
In case anyone's wondering what the uncanny valley is, this roughly explains it:
Hence, as the facial textures in the new updates are being updated, their skin looks more realistic, which makes their huge eyes and pinched faces seem all the more apparent. Having said that... it still looks like they INCREASED elven women eye size, when they really didn't need to, giving them that sex doll lifeless expression blended with the over-exaggerated features people are attributing to anime (Obviously not ALL anime has that sort of horrid proportion).
Hopefully that helps people understand why so many are kinda creeped out by some of the new faces. As harnel said, since the setting is fantasy and the characters aren't human, some exaggerated proportions will work, but it's currently too much, even when you try and overcompensate with the sliders the elves look horrible.
The faces in general seem to have the focus point too low down, with facial features all quite pinched. Maybe that's just the lack of a jaw, though. It shouldn't be such an uphill struggle for players to make a character who's proportions they aren't disgusted with.
Having said that, they're clearly still working on it, which is great. Hopefully they continue with the improvements we've already seen!
to be fair, what we are seeing on the preview shard is still in development. for me, it's not that i don't like what i'm seeing. i do like the added options A LOT. i'm glad they're providing more customization options.
If those are ADDED option, it's fine, I can live with the influx of ugly people in Neverwinter as long as I'm still pretty, I am not sure however if this really would be the case. Even if commom sense is telling me there's nothing to worry about, I would rather have some confirmation from devs.
Yeah, female elves had big eyes before but you could get them to a more normal size with sliders, now the options are HUGE and HUGE-er.
I hope the devs take this post as c&c and change some of the stuff, I have confidence they'll tweak things up a bit and let us have better faces in general.
to be fair, what we are seeing on the preview shard is still in development. for me, it's not that i don't like what i'm seeing. i do like the added options A LOT. i'm glad they're providing more customization options.
The thing is, from what we've seen so far, these are NOT added options. They REPLACE the existing options entirely, which is unacceptable, IMO. If they're *additions* with the same options as currently exist instituted, then OK. I don't mind in that case, I can happily ignore it, but at the present moment the original options are completely gone, which upsets me me as I greatly dislike the new stuff.
Greasy shiny plastic barbies, some races still have ears that don't connect to their heads, and if I wanted to use the new hairs for my CW to compensate for the fact that her eyes are now so huge they bulge through her hair and her eyelashes stick through it, I can't because her hair is black and the new hair is so ludicrously shiny that setting both colours to black just gets you a medium grey.
That's... Not OK. Especially if this mess is forced on us. Here, allow me to provide you all with visual evidence of what I'm talking about, character by character. I have no idea what happened on Preview with why it wouldn't let me zoom in all the way in the alteration tower interface after Eltain, so just deal with the new mess being smaller.
From left to right in the following, a screenshot from the Tower of Alteration on Live; a screenshot from the ToA on Preview of what happens by default when I take the character into the interface, and an edited new face attempting to get either closer to the original or at least less disgustingly ugly. Spoilers. None of them get close to the original, and most remain ugly. Two posts incoming, I have six chars. :P
Failure #1, Veldrin, Wood Elf TR:
This is Veldrin. He's a grumpy-looking elf. You'd be grumpy too if you were on your fourth god because your gods kept dying on you. He's got a facial tattoo which is somewhat subtle and looks about right for how I want it.
And then the default it gives him is a pinchy, plastic, hideous mess of squint and no lower face and huge eyebrows. Also, yeek, what happened to the tattoo? Suddenly its huge and somehow blacker than it already was.
An edit somewhat improves things by stretching the jaw width to its limit, raising the height quite a bit, changing the eyebrows and raising them to their max height, moving the mouth to the only place it can go without folding, which is the maximum mouth height... Even then, I don't know who this guy is, but he ain't Veldrin. I've been playing Veldrin since day one of open beta, and technically longer, because I created the first version of him in Beta Weekend 4. This is not my character.
Failure #2, Eltain, half-elf DC:
This is Eltain. He's a priest of Corellon, hence the crescent moon tattoos on his face.
By default... Oof. Who's this creepy-looking alien? Why doesn't his hair fit right? Why aren't his ears attached to his head? Why is he so shiny you can barely see his tattoos?
After editing, he still doesn't have much of a chin, still doesn't have hair that fits his head, naturally his ears still don't fit, and he doesn't look much like himself either. Actually ironically he looks more like Veldrin than Veldrin does, since half-elves aren't quite as pinchy as elves. Not shown here, however, is a texture tear at the left corner of his mouth that becomes apparent when turning him. I'll give this one that it's a prettier prettyboy and if the hair and ears worked right and the mouth didn't tear and he actually had a jaw, it wouldn't be that bad. One subtle annoyance: The new eye texture doesn't actually let you really see what colour his eyes are while the old one makes those ice blues obvious.
Failure #3, Araushnee, wood elf CW:
Araushnee, my spider-loving CW, who has a look of amused curiosity on her face from her eyebrow placement. Let's see how she does.
Ooof. Pinchy anime mess. Why are my eyebrows so squinty? Let's poke.
Nope. Giant anime eyes, and that's the smallest you can make them. Gone is the look of curiosity, that's the highest you can put eyebrows. Speaking of eyebrows, despite being set to black, they're *brown*. What? Fail. Not enough chin, huge eyes, brown eyebrows, overly long swan neck despite reducing it to the minimum... Nup. Dunno who this <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> barbie is, but that ain't my 'Raush.
Continuing on with the other three characters, let's see what we'll discover.
Failure #4, Velve, drow GF:
This is Velve. He's a male drow living on the surface, which is usually issue enough for most people, let's see what further issues we can give him.
Gah! What happened to his lower lip?! And his ears don't touch his head. And... Well we know by now this is going to be a mess by default, let's see what we can do.
...Not that much. Pinch-y plastic still. Something in the initial setup of this face won't allow for any possible combination of sliders to get rid of that weird pink tearing at the corners of his lips. No jaw, pinch pinch pinch, that ear issue, the hair issue Eltain had as well... Oof. Note how even after the neck shortening, despite this edited version being smaller than the live screenshot, the neck STILL looks longer than it does in the live screenshot. O_o; This is an awful, awful mess of derp.
Failure #5, Nest ferch Rhys, halfling GWF:
Nest comes through nearly unscathed, other than needing her eye size increased to de-squint her. Eyebrows are lower but mostly hidden by bangs. She looks like Captain Zemmer to begin with, and still does. Least traumatic, although as you can see the neck is still too long. As the middle shot where I forget to disable armor shows, armor hides this, but it's going to be very visible in fashion items that don't hide the neck or break it with a necklace. There's obviously progress here with the halfling options, but I'd still rather have the original Nest. :P Also I've apparently managed to accidentally get rid of her scar. Derp.
Failure #6, Veldrin Theleril, wood elf HR:
This Veldrin has very similar face scaling settings to Velve (They're twin brothers, after all) and suffers the same issues for the most part. He escapes the drow ear issue, but his hair still doesn't fit quite right and he still has that weird pink tearing at the corners of his mouth. Also continues that weird flared-at-the-top neck thing that's bugged me on all the males.
So... Yeah. Many, many issues needing to be fixed just within the context of the new options, many conversion problems, etc. Hopefully they'll properly add back the original options or provide a 'Use old character creation' button. Hopefully we won't be forced to switch to the new system. Remember how Harper Windle looked before they changed her? Not unless you've got a screenshot of her since the old model isn't used even in Neverdeath. Extremely disturbing is that a while back they changed *Wilfred* to use the new system. You know, the guy who dies five minutes after you make a character and is onscreen for maybe 30 seconds. There's no need to change him, unless... They're getting rid of the original options. Oof. No, please no. And yeah, only Nest even remotely looks like herself, which is ultra-annoying for someone like me who obsesses about how their chars look. :P
Oh, forgot to mention it on Eltain since he doesn't have a beard to begin with and it's been brought up before, but male half-elves still can't have beards anymore, which is dumb.
Largely inactive, playing Skyforge as Nai Calus.
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frozenflame22Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 56
Yesh! Those look horrible! Especially the men. I haven't really noticed such bad models on my characters since I play all female characters, but they are certainly not the same personalities now.
Yes, also the new female faces definitely suffer from the lack of chin and a forced exaggerated roundness, they are all moon-shaped... No wonder there's so little place for eyebrows. :S
Overall, the old settings look much better as compared to new ones...
Okay, I decided to try the same comparison styles. So, order goes live shard appearance, default altered appearance, manually altered to try and recreate the original.
My main, Kuthral. Resident grumpy scowling half-orc thug.
I like him at first. Somewhat bushy, lowered and scowling brow. Strong, unfriendly looking yellow eyes. Some rough features, but he doesn't look too old.
Next... Oh dear. Kuthral did you let elves give you a makeover? What's wrong with your teeth? ...Did you botox it up a bit? Thin, too-plucked looking eyebrow, removed his facial hair... A sort of 'pretty' smoothness to his skin which just looks freakish with his deliberately rough image. And half his jaw seems to be missing. Blegh.
And then the recreation... Actually not too bad. The teeth are obviously wrong, but I am going to hope that will be fixed at least. His eyes I couldn't make that strong yellow again, but they're more detailed, so... I can live with the compromise. Fixed his stubble, stretched his jaw as much as I could... It's still a bit shorter than original Kuthral... The tattoo (more warpaint in my head) is still... far more obvious than it should be. I gave him the 'old' complexion, thankfully doesn't make him look too old, just rougher. His eyebrows are perhaps what annoys me the most. I can't give him the same eyebrows as before, and they appear to be dark brown, not as black as his hair is. The textures overall are no doubt better quality, but his face shape is a bit... not quite what I'd wanted. Still, it could be a lot worse.
I was intending to see what my woodland ranger of a half-elf would look like, but unfortunately for whatever reason I can't push a copy of him over onto the test shard. It only gives the option of about half my character list. Maybe I'll see what my sun elf looks like, and hope she doesn't end up like a sex doll.
Yeah the features over all just look generally worse. The eye colors arent as apparent anymore. Placement of the eyes and eyebrows and sizes are even more restricted, and looooooots and loooots of clipping issues. The colors in general are just all wonky.
I feel bad for any new players after this rolls out.
So I did manage to copy my half-elf across... and yeah, not happy with the results.
First, I liked him, he was masculine but still had somewhat sharp, elven features.
Second... well. I shouldn't need to point out what's wrong. He looks so sad, but I think I would too if I was completely lacking in a jaw.
Finally... Absolutely maxed out his jaw and chin... Yet still his features are just quite pinched and boyish. He looks like a boy who went outside and got a bit of dirt on his face, rather than a ranger who's lived most of his life in the wilderness... Guess which image I was hoping to inspire when I first made the character? I like that his cheek bones are a bit more pronounced, gives him a slightly more elven look... but he doesn't really resemble a human at all. While I would still play Kuthral in my previous post after alterations, this character would be just ruined for me if that;s the best I can get. Let half elves have some of the less heavy facial hairs! (The male ones at least. Female half elves with beards, not so much)
And now, my sun elf:
I never really liked her HUGE eyes, which were still as small as I could make them, but I was happy. She has the delicate, angular features of an elf, and is quite definitely 'pretty' without coming across as though she should work in a brothel (Albiet, I obviously took her top off for this. She's usually much more covered! Just didn't want the distractions from her face)
Her eyes in the second image are about the same size, though that the rest of her face is so... squished together and small, combined with the HUGE eyelashes give her that dreaded anime, too-shiny eyes. Besides that, I'm happier with the colour this time.
I tried to compensate for everything in the last image, maxing out the jaw/chin sliders, giving her the slightly older complexion to try and add a bit of texture to her face so it didn't look quite so plastic. Shortened her neck a bit, gave her less bushy eyebrows... And I'm still not happy with it. There's no doubt the texture of her eyes is much improved, but with that much more detail in lashes and such, they just look too big and have too much focus in her still much too tiny face. Her face looks more cold and distant... but for all the wrong reasons. It's because it looks lifeless and plastic, not because the character's a cold, aloof ***** as she should be.
I will have to keep checking to see what else they update. The changes to the male tieflings went well, so we'll see.
Comments
Probably should, I was a bit lazy there. But that's not going to change the face structure, which is the main issue.
That maybe true. But here's my question: the 'new' face was the changed default. But did you try to change it back to what you had or is the picture you are displaying just the immediate "default reset" when you first went in there? Because if you have actually gone in to customize and attempt to recreate what you had and this is the best you could come up with then I agree: this would be epicfail.
However, if this is just the face that the system defaulted to then it makes sense as it resets itself in preparation for your new customization. It still isn't right as any alteration you make should be from the starting point of your existing look. But, even so - the true question here is: is that new face the best you could do in actually recreating your look, or not?
Thanks for your picture comparison. It's helpful to see where the system stands right now, though I would also remind everyone it's all still a work-in-progress and will (hopefully) get a lot better.
Also yeah work-in progress, and I'm hoping for some major improvements before it goes live, but my initial reactions is leaving me with a feeling of dread.
As I've said to a few people elsewhere, the new character facial models tend to have a sort of anime quality to them. and if anime has anything, it's pointy chins, rather than strong wide ones. Frankly, I like looking at big beefy men. I'd much rather have some giant hairy brute than an androgynous prettyboy.
I tried editing kiasan again, but no matter what I did he still looked deformed, but since there were new faces, I tried recreating him from scratch as best I could, this is what I got.
Old screenshot
New one..
That looks a lot better now, though still a lot of room for improvement, there's still a lack of chin.. I had to max out the chin width and chin length sliders. And picked the head shape with the most square jaw... considering that's literally as big as chins get, its quite lacking in chin.
but I'm seeing improvements, and hopefully it will keep improving.
Still.. REALLY WANT STUBBLE ON HIM
yeah that's been a recent thing, a few days ago there was only 1 choice for tiefling faces, which looked like the one in the first screenshot. But seeing things getting better and better is leaving me feeling positive about it all. which is good. Still a fair way to go before I could say I'm happy with it, but it is just a work in progress at the moment.
I'm hoping the pouty lips wont be a necessity by the time mod 3 is released.
And I can't say it enough, I really would love to have some facial hair choices for tiefling men, would go a long way to stopping them from all looking so samey. That, and my character is supposed to be rugged, stubble would complete his look.
Unfortunately for whatever idiot reason the game doesn't save screenshots for me while in the Tower of Alteration, so my results from playing with my characters last night weren't actually saved, so I'll have to do it again when I'm not about to leave, but... Aye carumba. Only my Halfling comes through even remotely decently, and even then she looks nothing like herself. My other chars are all elves/half-elves/drow, and... Ugh. The defaults that come through are horrific, and even the fixes are bad and look nothing like them. My half-elf's ears STILL don't touch his head under the new faces, and my male woodelves' hair no longer actually connects to their head. It's still disgusting.
No it would not. My cute tielfling simply doesn't look like herself no matter what I do, and it's not about her chin.
real anime faces are that ugly. its the uncanny vally. they work in anime because that's the setting, but if you seen someone walking down the street in real life with the facial proportions of an anime character you'd probably be horrified. This game is not an anime, therefor that style of disproportionate faces looks out of place and unappealing.
Hence, as the facial textures in the new updates are being updated, their skin looks more realistic, which makes their huge eyes and pinched faces seem all the more apparent. Having said that... it still looks like they INCREASED elven women eye size, when they really didn't need to, giving them that sex doll lifeless expression blended with the over-exaggerated features people are attributing to anime (Obviously not ALL anime has that sort of horrid proportion).
Hopefully that helps people understand why so many are kinda creeped out by some of the new faces. As harnel said, since the setting is fantasy and the characters aren't human, some exaggerated proportions will work, but it's currently too much, even when you try and overcompensate with the sliders the elves look horrible.
The faces in general seem to have the focus point too low down, with facial features all quite pinched. Maybe that's just the lack of a jaw, though. It shouldn't be such an uphill struggle for players to make a character who's proportions they aren't disgusted with.
Having said that, they're clearly still working on it, which is great. Hopefully they continue with the improvements we've already seen!
I hope the devs take this post as c&c and change some of the stuff, I have confidence they'll tweak things up a bit and let us have better faces in general.
The thing is, from what we've seen so far, these are NOT added options. They REPLACE the existing options entirely, which is unacceptable, IMO. If they're *additions* with the same options as currently exist instituted, then OK. I don't mind in that case, I can happily ignore it, but at the present moment the original options are completely gone, which upsets me me as I greatly dislike the new stuff.
Greasy shiny plastic barbies, some races still have ears that don't connect to their heads, and if I wanted to use the new hairs for my CW to compensate for the fact that her eyes are now so huge they bulge through her hair and her eyelashes stick through it, I can't because her hair is black and the new hair is so ludicrously shiny that setting both colours to black just gets you a medium grey.
That's... Not OK. Especially if this mess is forced on us. Here, allow me to provide you all with visual evidence of what I'm talking about, character by character. I have no idea what happened on Preview with why it wouldn't let me zoom in all the way in the alteration tower interface after Eltain, so just deal with the new mess being smaller.
From left to right in the following, a screenshot from the Tower of Alteration on Live; a screenshot from the ToA on Preview of what happens by default when I take the character into the interface, and an edited new face attempting to get either closer to the original or at least less disgustingly ugly. Spoilers. None of them get close to the original, and most remain ugly. Two posts incoming, I have six chars. :P
Failure #1, Veldrin, Wood Elf TR:
This is Veldrin. He's a grumpy-looking elf. You'd be grumpy too if you were on your fourth god because your gods kept dying on you. He's got a facial tattoo which is somewhat subtle and looks about right for how I want it.
And then the default it gives him is a pinchy, plastic, hideous mess of squint and no lower face and huge eyebrows. Also, yeek, what happened to the tattoo? Suddenly its huge and somehow blacker than it already was.
An edit somewhat improves things by stretching the jaw width to its limit, raising the height quite a bit, changing the eyebrows and raising them to their max height, moving the mouth to the only place it can go without folding, which is the maximum mouth height... Even then, I don't know who this guy is, but he ain't Veldrin. I've been playing Veldrin since day one of open beta, and technically longer, because I created the first version of him in Beta Weekend 4. This is not my character.
Failure #2, Eltain, half-elf DC:
This is Eltain. He's a priest of Corellon, hence the crescent moon tattoos on his face.
By default... Oof. Who's this creepy-looking alien? Why doesn't his hair fit right? Why aren't his ears attached to his head? Why is he so shiny you can barely see his tattoos?
After editing, he still doesn't have much of a chin, still doesn't have hair that fits his head, naturally his ears still don't fit, and he doesn't look much like himself either. Actually ironically he looks more like Veldrin than Veldrin does, since half-elves aren't quite as pinchy as elves. Not shown here, however, is a texture tear at the left corner of his mouth that becomes apparent when turning him. I'll give this one that it's a prettier prettyboy and if the hair and ears worked right and the mouth didn't tear and he actually had a jaw, it wouldn't be that bad. One subtle annoyance: The new eye texture doesn't actually let you really see what colour his eyes are while the old one makes those ice blues obvious.
Failure #3, Araushnee, wood elf CW:
Araushnee, my spider-loving CW, who has a look of amused curiosity on her face from her eyebrow placement. Let's see how she does.
Ooof. Pinchy anime mess. Why are my eyebrows so squinty? Let's poke.
Nope. Giant anime eyes, and that's the smallest you can make them. Gone is the look of curiosity, that's the highest you can put eyebrows. Speaking of eyebrows, despite being set to black, they're *brown*. What? Fail.
Failure #4, Velve, drow GF:
This is Velve. He's a male drow living on the surface, which is usually issue enough for most people, let's see what further issues we can give him.
Gah! What happened to his lower lip?! And his ears don't touch his head. And... Well we know by now this is going to be a mess by default, let's see what we can do.
...Not that much. Pinch-y plastic still. Something in the initial setup of this face won't allow for any possible combination of sliders to get rid of that weird pink tearing at the corners of his lips. No jaw, pinch pinch pinch, that ear issue, the hair issue Eltain had as well... Oof. Note how even after the neck shortening, despite this edited version being smaller than the live screenshot, the neck STILL looks longer than it does in the live screenshot. O_o; This is an awful, awful mess of derp.
Failure #5, Nest ferch Rhys, halfling GWF:
Nest comes through nearly unscathed, other than needing her eye size increased to de-squint her. Eyebrows are lower but mostly hidden by bangs. She looks like Captain Zemmer to begin with, and still does. Least traumatic, although as you can see the neck is still too long. As the middle shot where I forget to disable armor shows, armor hides this, but it's going to be very visible in fashion items that don't hide the neck or break it with a necklace. There's obviously progress here with the halfling options, but I'd still rather have the original Nest. :P Also I've apparently managed to accidentally get rid of her scar. Derp.
Failure #6, Veldrin Theleril, wood elf HR:
This Veldrin has very similar face scaling settings to Velve (They're twin brothers, after all) and suffers the same issues for the most part. He escapes the drow ear issue, but his hair still doesn't fit quite right and he still has that weird pink tearing at the corners of his mouth. Also continues that weird flared-at-the-top neck thing that's bugged me on all the males.
So... Yeah. Many, many issues needing to be fixed just within the context of the new options, many conversion problems, etc. Hopefully they'll properly add back the original options or provide a 'Use old character creation' button. Hopefully we won't be forced to switch to the new system. Remember how Harper Windle looked before they changed her? Not unless you've got a screenshot of her since the old model isn't used even in Neverdeath. Extremely disturbing is that a while back they changed *Wilfred* to use the new system. You know, the guy who dies five minutes after you make a character and is onscreen for maybe 30 seconds. There's no need to change him, unless... They're getting rid of the original options. Oof. No, please no. And yeah, only Nest even remotely looks like herself, which is ultra-annoying for someone like me who obsesses about how their chars look. :P
Oh, forgot to mention it on Eltain since he doesn't have a beard to begin with and it's been brought up before, but male half-elves still can't have beards anymore, which is dumb.
Yesh! Those look horrible! Especially the men. I haven't really noticed such bad models on my characters since I play all female characters, but they are certainly not the same personalities now.
Overall, the old settings look much better as compared to new ones...
My main, Kuthral. Resident grumpy scowling half-orc thug.
I like him at first. Somewhat bushy, lowered and scowling brow. Strong, unfriendly looking yellow eyes. Some rough features, but he doesn't look too old.
Next... Oh dear. Kuthral did you let elves give you a makeover? What's wrong with your teeth? ...Did you botox it up a bit? Thin, too-plucked looking eyebrow, removed his facial hair... A sort of 'pretty' smoothness to his skin which just looks freakish with his deliberately rough image. And half his jaw seems to be missing. Blegh.
And then the recreation... Actually not too bad. The teeth are obviously wrong, but I am going to hope that will be fixed at least. His eyes I couldn't make that strong yellow again, but they're more detailed, so... I can live with the compromise. Fixed his stubble, stretched his jaw as much as I could... It's still a bit shorter than original Kuthral... The tattoo (more warpaint in my head) is still... far more obvious than it should be. I gave him the 'old' complexion, thankfully doesn't make him look too old, just rougher. His eyebrows are perhaps what annoys me the most. I can't give him the same eyebrows as before, and they appear to be dark brown, not as black as his hair is. The textures overall are no doubt better quality, but his face shape is a bit... not quite what I'd wanted. Still, it could be a lot worse.
I was intending to see what my woodland ranger of a half-elf would look like, but unfortunately for whatever reason I can't push a copy of him over onto the test shard. It only gives the option of about half my character list. Maybe I'll see what my sun elf looks like, and hope she doesn't end up like a sex doll.
I feel bad for any new players after this rolls out.
First, I liked him, he was masculine but still had somewhat sharp, elven features.
Second... well. I shouldn't need to point out what's wrong. He looks so sad, but I think I would too if I was completely lacking in a jaw.
Finally... Absolutely maxed out his jaw and chin... Yet still his features are just quite pinched and boyish. He looks like a boy who went outside and got a bit of dirt on his face, rather than a ranger who's lived most of his life in the wilderness... Guess which image I was hoping to inspire when I first made the character? I like that his cheek bones are a bit more pronounced, gives him a slightly more elven look... but he doesn't really resemble a human at all. While I would still play Kuthral in my previous post after alterations, this character would be just ruined for me if that;s the best I can get. Let half elves have some of the less heavy facial hairs! (The male ones at least. Female half elves with beards, not so much)
And now, my sun elf:
I never really liked her HUGE eyes, which were still as small as I could make them, but I was happy. She has the delicate, angular features of an elf, and is quite definitely 'pretty' without coming across as though she should work in a brothel (Albiet, I obviously took her top off for this. She's usually much more covered! Just didn't want the distractions from her face)
Her eyes in the second image are about the same size, though that the rest of her face is so... squished together and small, combined with the HUGE eyelashes give her that dreaded anime, too-shiny eyes. Besides that, I'm happier with the colour this time.
I tried to compensate for everything in the last image, maxing out the jaw/chin sliders, giving her the slightly older complexion to try and add a bit of texture to her face so it didn't look quite so plastic. Shortened her neck a bit, gave her less bushy eyebrows... And I'm still not happy with it. There's no doubt the texture of her eyes is much improved, but with that much more detail in lashes and such, they just look too big and have too much focus in her still much too tiny face. Her face looks more cold and distant... but for all the wrong reasons. It's because it looks lifeless and plastic, not because the character's a cold, aloof ***** as she should be.
I will have to keep checking to see what else they update. The changes to the male tieflings went well, so we'll see.