Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida posted a final Lodestone update summarizing the graphical enhancements made to the new Dawntrail benchmark character creator. This all-new version lands tomorrow, June 3.
Here’s a quick summary of the graphical updates shared by Yoshida.
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An enhanced “time of day” option has been added to the character creator’s Aetherial Background's new "time of day" option to accurately display character skin tones. Players are now able to select the default blue lighting or plain lighting.
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The dark translucency of the character creator menu has been removed to prevent it from impacting color perceptions of certain character features.
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Highlights impacting pupils and lip gloss now reflect the updated lighting process for crisper highlights. Also, the rendering process and texture of lips have been revised to make them more attractive.
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They have redrawn the high-resolution textures and normal maps to restore facial impressions of certain races around the eyes and to bring the results as close as possible to the state of Patch 6.58.
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Low-resolution textures in parts of hair have been removed.
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Many improvements have been made to ensure self-shadowing would look good on every hairstyle.
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To prevent characters from appearing flat under certain conditions, adjustments to characters' environmental lighting have been made to preserve a three-dimensional appearance even when a character isn’t being lit.
While these are the primary enhancements made based on player feedback from the first benchmark, Yoshida explains that the improvements are much more extensive. Remember, these updates aren’t just indicative of what’s coming in tomorrow’s new benchmark; these changes are also being implemented in the launch version of Dawntrail coming soon on July 2.
For more details on the new benchmark, Dawntrail’s graphical update, and more, you can check out Yoshida’s full post on The Lodestone. You can also preorder the Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail expansion now.
