Werewolf Style transformation black color is not really black. Why?

Scaletho · July 13

The WW black style is BARELY a dark-ish grey not so far from the ASHEN option. The white color is really a WHITE, why the black is so wrong??

Is there still someone at ZOS after the sad talents layoff that could FIX this or the situation is now so bad that ESO will just receive the most basic maintenance? No fixes? No updates? No improvements?

This "new" Thieves update has been suffering from oh so many problems since day one and so far little was done. Anyway, at least fix the WW style colors. I can't imagine this is too much to ask.

Erickson9610 · July 13

I'll quote what I wrote in a similar thread:

Erickson9610 wrote: »

If you inspect the texture files for the fur textures themselves, you'll notice that they have a lot more contrast versus when compared in-game:

(I scaled these textures down for this preview; each is actually 2048x2048)

Compare this contrast to the old Werewolf textures. Player-usable textures are on the top row, and NPC-only textures are on the bottom row:

(Once again, I've scaled these textures down for the preview. Each texture is 2048x2048)

I believe it's harder to tell apart the black fur and the ashen fur because of the lighting that is applied in the game world. The warm lighting of the environment may be making both the black fur and ashen fur textures look a similar color, since both are barely saturated in some parts.

By contrast, the old brown fur texture is unreasonably saturated in color.

In this super old screenshot, you can see that the black fur of the old model isn't quite as black as the dire wolves, yet there is significantly more contrast between them and the unmorphed brown fur:

Interestingly, if you compare the old black fur texture and the new black fur texture, you'll notice that the old is slightly hue shifted to blue, while the new is hue shifted to red, just like the ashen texture. So, I would recommend hue shifting the fur of the new black fur texture to a dark blue, so that it appears darker and doesn't look so similar to the ashen texture, which is also hue shifted towards warmer colors.

The tl;dr is that the old black fur texture was hue shifted to cooler colors and the brown fur was extremely saturated, while the new black fur texture is hue shifted to warmer colors, just like the ashen texture, which is also now less saturated than the old brown texture used to be.

I think all that needs to be done is to hue shift the new black texture to a more blue color to give it a darker appearance and to ensure the lighting system doesn't illuminate that material so similarly to the ashen fur material. I don't think the ashen fur texture needs more saturation, but that is another avenue that can be explored.