It's really the white eyelashes more than the hair change for me.
It only looks like it's her makeup, because of the resolution. What's happening is that our eye concentrates on the negative space between the lashes, which inverts the impression and makes it look like she's wearing white eyeliner (but still has black spidereye lashes), rather than just seeing that they are in-fact white eyeslashes lol.
Her eyeshadow and underbrow is still dark, so it looks like we're seeing rough outlines when we're meant to see the opposite thing going on. But we are so used to seeing dark lashes that our brain fills in the gaps backwards, and it just ends up looking pixelated or badly rendered or something.
When its zoomed in close it looks better, but usually we're zoomed out too far to see, so our eyes play tricks.
It's just poorly drawn out right now for the lashes. They should revert to the old dark lashes, or else clean em up a lot more, just so it's not that stark. It totally jumped out at me right away. It even displays on the portrait for the custom PC if they choose the same color for their own hair. Took me forever to figure out why it looked so off. I'm no Sephora specialist, middle aged dude that I am haha, but I'm pretty sure that's what's going on. At least for the eyes. Blonde or even Albino lashes would look a lot more translucent than this, even set against a darker skintone or eyeshadow, so even a fantasy 'Natural Green' or 'Natural Pink' hair/brow/eyelash color should be much more subtle than this. They probably just need to turn the hair opacity way down for it to carry better with those colors.
Otherwise I still think the Purple outfit suited her better. Her old hair seemed a bit more 80s rocker to me too, which I liked, but the new cut is cool as well. I think perhaps they wanted to give her a unique hairstyle, the way Kagha has a different hairdo to set her apart. But I thought there was some character there in the ratty Minthara tangles, that sort of goes away with this new more carefully couffed trim. She feels less hardcore to me now, but it's whatever. Their character I suppose, I just think they had a better direction initially.
I did tend to avoid that hair for female PCs, because it was clearly Minthara's haircut, so maybe by changing her hairstyle it makes that original wildling hairdo more versatile for the custom PC in some way? But I still liked the first trim better for her character.
There is also a general issue with artifacts in pretty much every haircut I've seen. Not just the clipping through the ears type stuff, but jpeggery around the individal strands of hair. Its especially noticeable with white, but it's there for just about every haircut that isn't pretty dark in color. You can see it especially in the longer styles, or with bouncing ponys and such. I'm sure they'll clean it up eventually, but right now there are several cuts I avoid for the custom PC just because they look too digital in the rendering even at the highest resolution. Otherwise this game has done a very good job of making hair that doesn't look terrible, but it would be nice to see a little more finish there to clean everything up.
In representational drawing and painting, the first thing they teach you is NOT to draw individual strands of hair initially, but to start with the larger masses of shapes and shadow. Saving the individual strands for flair or accents at the end. I think the same applies here to the digital modelling, where they went a little overboard drawing out strands. They need to mask it off a bit and soften things up somehow, so we don't get those little jagged breaks like digital split ends all over the place lol.
But yeah, right now Drow eyelashes are really rough since patch 5. They need to fix that. The same thing happens if you want light pink or light blue or whatever color hair, it looks super bizarro around the eyes with the lash matching in lighter colors. It's also inconsistent, since some of the available hair color choices will alter the look of the lashes or the brows or both, while others won't change them at all. Minthara's default hair color just happens to be one of those whites that now alters both the lashes and the middle brows, which looks pretty eck from any distance other than the Ulta ultra zoom. But we hardly ever see that view, even in the close up cinematics.
Last edited by Black_Elk; 06/08/21 12:34 AM.
