As you may have noticed while admiring your character’s face, light is now reflected on the character’s eyes. Actually no, it’s not just reflected, the character’s eyes glow like a cat’s eyes would, almost as if there’s an outwards-facing flashlight held right behind the iris.
Now these forums are a place to -of all things- discuss World of Warcraft, of all subjects, so I will boldly go ahead and assume that a good portion of the readers and posters here haven’t interacted with another human being for quite some time. So allow me an elaboration. The human eye does not work like that, human eyes do not glow in the dark and the light isn’t reflected in the same way that it would bounce off a mirror in the desert, unless the person in question is a Blade Runner replicant, or idk, possessed or something.
Would it make sense for Worgen eyes to glow? Vulpera eyes maybe? Maybe. But for human eyes, or any humanoid’s eyes, for that matter, this makes zero sense and most importantly, it just doesn’t look good.
That’s called a “specular” and every surface IRL reflects in the same way (with different values). The only reason WHY it looks not good in WoW so far is for one, main reason…
The Lighting Rig for our characters eye reflection has’t been updated yet to work with the new eye reflection accordingly.
Anyway… I like the reflection overal, but they do need to alter the eye textures for some races; having a ‘painted’ specular and a ‘generated’ specular both at the same time, is just silly.
We have always had the light reflection in our eyes. It’s just that for some reason they decided to move it away from being a drawn texture to a misaligned moving dot.
From the company that brought you nights brighter than days and raytraced shadows where the light source is invisible and fixed to the character, comes a new wonderful feature: incorrect phong shading.
Behold! The worst lighting engine in the industry - now with 33% worse lighting.
