Square Enix has provided IGN with eight gorgeous, high-res looks at the game’s main cast, as well as commentary from Art Director Yusuke Naora.
Check the link for the rest of Naora's commentary:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/08/06/8-gorgeous-photos-of-final-fantasy-xvas-characters
***EDIT: Before anyone wonders about the image quality, I tried grabbing the highest-res images from the IGN article by changing the URL, but I couldn't find anything better than these compressed ones. Thing is, IGN only shows them in mid-size in their photo gallery, so I guess they didn't intend them to be blown up this much.***
Yusuke Naora:
"In order to create that reality baseline that blended into our real world, I first enhanced Noctis’ skin texture even further to make it several levels more realistic. This did not stop at just the depictions of subtle blotches and birth marks, but also involved the use of “screen space” technology to depict the texture of the skin and the subcutaneous light penetration, etc., in order to make Noctis look like a real flesh and blood human being. For his hair design, because we made improvements in shadow expression, it ended up casting dark shadows on his face. I then adjusted the effects to make it harder for shadows to form over his hair. The image of Noctis and his comrades had already been revealed to the world, so we put in great effort to not alter the people’s impressions of the characters in a major way. For example, rather than going for reality, I treated their hair style features as symbols of the characters and chose not to make any adjustments."
Poor Prompto not in the article, LOL, but here's his render from another source:
