My characters face has changed right after character creation.

Tapio75 · March 2018

Marginis wrote: »

I've had my main character from day 1 on PC. Since moving to console, he specifically (and a few of my other characters who I don't spend too much time with, so I don't notice their changes as much) has changed drastically, several times (always with one of the main patches). He is a khajiit, and I've had to skinny up his face and muscle up his body a few months ago - that's the first time I noticed something going on. This time his body needed to be muscled up a bit more, his butt had to go out some, and his eyes were WAY too high up from what they were. I also had to de-squint his eyes. Having spent over 4 years with this cat, I know him... way too intimately. I have pictures but none are from a neutral position in similar lighting, before and after patch. At this point I don't know if I care (I'll just have to keep getting appearance change tokens), because this stuff is going to happen regardless of what I think, but I'd definitely like it if I wasn't forced to spend a few thousand crowns (it takes a few goes to get everything right) every patch or two just so my main character, who I RP with, that I've been with since the beta, looks about the same as he used to.

tl;dr Character creation is one thing, but oftentimes stuff will get changed with major patches, so you'll never get everything perfect, at least until ZOS stops changing appearances with patches.

Perphaps their marketing dept is pushing this ploy in patches, to promote appearance change token sales.. The whole idea disgust me but why correct the issue, when the issue is making profit to the company.

Anyways, when the day comes, i gonna take some pics of my new redguard and give them here.

The head is allready looking wider and fattier than it looked in chargen >.<

Ectheliontnacil · March 2018

@Tapio75

I was actually talking about the triangle when i said you go to the "soft" corner of the triangle

. Sry if I didn't explain that correctly.

The facial triangle adjustment is very much subject to your race. For instance female Altmer look best if with very soft faces but bretons, who have inherently round faces, should perhaps stick to the middle section. In general I would advise you move the cursor towards the "soft" corner until all creases on your character's skin vanish.

In regards to the body shape triangle, I can only tell you my personal preference. I like my males well muscled and my females in shape

.

Marginis · March 2018

Ectheliontnacil wrote: »

@Tapio75

I was actually talking about the triangle when i said you go to the "soft" corner of the triangle . Sry if I didn't explain that correctly.

The facial triangle adjustment is very much subject to your race. For instance female Altmer look best if with very soft faces but bretons, who have inherently round faces, should perhaps stick to the middle section. In general I would advise you move the cursor towards the "soft" corner until all creases on your character's skin vanish.

In regards to the body shape triangle, I can only tell you my personal preference. I like my males well muscled and my females in shape .

Protip: If you ever need to adjust the triangle sliders, particularly on console, use the D-pad to go in any of the 8 primary directions. From there you can usually notice when the appearance changes based on which invisible sector the dot is in. When adjusting you can then at least stay in the same sector every time you restart your character creation. I personally generally stay on the edges and make sure I only go until I just barely hit a new sector.

Tapio75 · March 2018

@Ectheliontnacil

Thanks for clearing that up, i read i poorly

Regarding the body. With females, i always use a combination of fat/muscle inside the smaller circle or at its round. It seems to make best resus.. Besides females naturally have more fat tisuue than males so i think it makes sense. As for males, i go to muscular cat or somewhat fat orc

Heres the new images of the new character.

Chargen:

https://imgur.com/a/y7Uq2

Night at the slaver camp:

https://imgur.com/a/jhBj7

Ingame candleligt:

https://imgur.com/a/rGdmK

Daylight near Balmora:

https://imgur.com/a/Rybd2

As you see, the shadows again, make the face look rather bad.. At least in my opinion. I think the shadows are too pronounced and this makes face look what it looks like. In natural real sunlight, i dont see such happening, only when someone plays with flashlight to make "horror" faces, the effect is similar.

RaddlemanNumber7 · March 2018

jlmurra2 wrote: »

RaddlemanNumber7 wrote: »

I make my new characters on the PTS first. I can then check what they look like in-game and then tinker where necessary. Once I have the look I'm after I screenshot all the sliders and then use the pics to create the character on live.

Is there no delete limit on the PTS?

I don't delete the character if it needs more work. I use a crown store appearance/race change token to get it back into the character creation dialogue. There is no practical limit to the number of those tokens you can buy with the crowns you are given on PTS, although I don't think I've ever used more than two tokens on any character.

Feric51 · March 2018

Vizikul wrote: »

Feric51 wrote: »

Run first person. There are no mirrors in Tamriel. You can just imagine the perfect face.

There are "mirrors" in Tamriel. I got one in one of my homes but those "mirrors" do not reflect anything.

Are you a vampire?

Just kidding. Yeah, I realize there are mirror's on certain furniture, but I guess I just meant no "functioning" mirrors.

Glaiceana · March 2018

Yes been in this situation. This is why the lighting really needs to have options in the character creation screen. Let us choose real locations in the game to set the character in.

This is how my main went through her transformation:

I played a year with her looking how she did in the top 2 screenshots. Until I had the option to go and change the appearance with the new tokens when they were first added. The bottom 3 show her appearance now. One on the left is without the eye and lip effects. The look she has now is what I intended when making her in the creation screen. After having played the game that long and made other characters, I got a sense of how to adjust things in the creation screen in order to actually get the results I intended in game. I am happy with her now! But it shouldn't require editing the character again, or in some people's cases, deleting and starting over.

TheShadowScout wrote: »

Tapio75 wrote: »

Yesterday, i spent well over an hour, to create a perfect character with nice face and a litle smile. I was quite pleased with it.
Then i logged in and noticed...

...something like this, perhaps?

@TheShadowScout Thank you for sharing that, haven't seen it before and its just perfect

Ectheliontnacil · March 2018

@Tapio75

I like what you've done with your character a lot! Looks very pretty

.

This isn't a fix to the shadow problem but if you want great looking screenshots, you should go to an ayleid delve where there are yellow crystals (some delves have blue crystals which don't really work). These crystals provide beautiful lighting for your screenshots, it's nothing major but it helps if you just want some good looking pictures ^^ .

Marabornwingrion · March 2018

Your characters face didn't change after you left character creator - but the lighting did.

SydneyGrey · March 2018

I made a Nord guy with a slight smile once. When I brought him into the game, he suddenly looked like a grinning Ken doll. A red-haired Ken doll was not the look I was going for. LOL. I think it was just that the smile didn't seem as obnoxious in the character creator. Maybe something similar happened to you. What I thought was a "slight smile" wasn't quite as slight as I expected.

Oreyn_Bearclaw · March 2018

This has happened to me about 17-18 times. It never looks like it does in the character screen. I recently race changed one of my nightblades, and his face looks NOTHING like when I created it. I have actually on a few occasions created a character, and then immediately deleted it and did it again because it was so different. It's even more frustrating when its the result of a change token that you paid for.

ericsparrow · March 2018

Hey OP

I think what is happening to your character is two fold. As people are mentioning already its the lighting. That character creation screen is very controlled as soon as you step outside of the that, the game is lit for the world not for the characters. As a long time character artist in games, f**king lighting is a bug bear like you wouldn't believe

( actually its generally inconsiderate post processing but that's a conversaation for another time )

gcopt

https://imgur.com/a/gcopt

Something that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is camera field of view. I did a test, made a character that looked somewhat like yours and ran her into the world. Tried to embed the picture but it didn't seem to work for me so I have included a link as well. With the default settings, the default 3rd person camera is 110 i think ( or possibly 100 ) your characters face is much wider than in the character select screen. I think that's considerably lower in the creation screen, the minimum I could get it in game was 70 so its either that or lower.

If you look at my pic No1 was the character run out of the starting boat and into the fresh air but with the camera changed to 70. Looks pretty much the same but the lighting is more extreme. Pics 2 and 3 further illustrate the point. They are a bit further down the road with the toon standing in the same place, Pic 2 with the setting at 70 ( also with the camera moved so the character was in the centre of the screen ) and then Pic 3 with the settings reverted back to default. Makes a huge difference in how the character looks.

As to stuff like facial animation, I would personally advise if you plan on using personality stuff or anything that changes the mouth to leave the mouth as is at creation. Keep the sliders neutral. Moving the mouth up and down / scaling would be fine but try and avoid anything that rotates the mouth or puts and "character" in it. All you will do is be animating from the wrong place when the new pose is applied and it will come out wrong. Happiness will not ensue.

Cheers

Tapio75 · March 2018

@Ectheliontnacil
Thanks. I mostly did subtle changes. The major changes were the triangle going from slightly angular to major soft so it was what you suggested and helped a bit with broad daylight shadows. I also made lips actually lone less full than default, raised eyebrows 4 times and picked differen brow as well.. Made eyebrow depth less pronounced too. Raised eyes 2 times and mouth 1 time. Made a litle smaller nose as well.

I am pretty pleased with her now and the journey can begin

There are great places for screenshots, id like to have a free camera mode however, so that i could fully choose the screenshots perspective to get some details on the picture as well.

temjiu · March 2018

Yup, I hate this aspect of ESO. Can't tell you how many times I've had to delete and redo a toon simply because of the difference.

For my two favorite races, Bosmer and Redguard, it seems to be even more pronounced. I think it has to do with how the cheekbones stand out in relation to the face. you don't see it in the CC screen, which is misleading. I have yet to be able to make a Redguard female that didn't look unhappy or at best, sour.

Another solution would be to give us more flexible control of the facial aspects. I know we certainly have allot already, but some of them feel very ineffective for all the Slider that you have. Example: moving the Cheekbones up and down seems to have very little effect IMO, but yet we don't have any way of making the cheekbones protrude LESS, which would have a HUGE impact on the Redguard in actual in-game lighting.

Tapio75 · March 2018

@temjiu
Have you ever played Aion or Star Trek Online?

Those two are my favourite regarding character creation, so much freedom to sculpt exactly what you want.

I do recognize, that certain racial aspects need to exist to separate Redguard, Breton and so forth, but they could stil give more control over the stuff. Fpr example the cheekbone pronouncion would be a good addition as well as brow angle (The brow hair). Also some control over skull shape would be good. Puffed/ga7unt cheeks etc...

@v Yjanks, i had not thought of field of wiev. I shall test it tomorrow to see how it changes stuff. Othervise im happy with my character right now, i just wish i could adjust the cheekbones and cheeks in general a bit more.

disintegr8 · March 2018

All of my characters faces look different to how they looked in the character creation screen. The two biggest things that annoy me are skin tone (esp on a dark elf) and mouth shape - all of my toons look as grumpy as!.

ADarklore · March 2018

It isn't even the lighting... the settings in the creator 'change' once you're in-game. Try the eyebrow skew... in the creator they look perfectly even, but once in the game, one eyebrow is skewed higher than the other. There are other settings that are similar- what you see in the creator is NOT how it applies in-game. Interesting how the creator looks more like your character select screen... but then once in-game, the character looks different... it's as if your character receives a big visual downgrade in-game.

I think far too many people don't notice because I know so many who don't really care what their character looks like... but many of us do appreciate appearances.

D0PAMINE · March 2018

My characters are older, intimidating, and as evil as possible. Gotta love facial scars, skewed and angled eyebrows, and that menacing vampire grin.

SydneyGrey · March 2018

By the way, people who have access to the test server can create their character on the test server first, write down all the face and body specs (or take screenshots of them), then re-create the look on the live server. I do this with all of mine.

Runefang · March 2018

At least it didn't happen to you in real life. I was cute at creation... What the heck happened after that..