To be completely honest I’ve never really been satisfied with the original models. Using a real-time, path-based rendering system for simple models designed with anime-like proportions is a tad overkill; the styles don’t really mesh well, shadow management is a bit difficult, and it can take some time to actually render the images - with the gloss and reflectivity on Erika’s Viking outfit, those images could take anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds. Multiply that by six unique weight stages, each with ten levels of inflation, and that wasted time adds up. A full CG would take much longer, especially with a lot of lighting or a large scene size; it took about 20 minutes to render the single cyberpunk CG at the end of the game.
By comparison, the toon-like filament rendering is pretty much instant unless I have the canvas set to an absurd resolution. Managing lighting and shadows is much more forgiving, and some of the rougher edges caused by blowing up some body parts much larger than intended are easier to hide. The downside is that every material and texture has to be adjusted for the change in rendering, which means I’d have to work on two sets of textures (and extra changes for managing transparency, properly meshing the colors of different bits of anatomy, etc.) if I wanted to keep rendering the older models alongside the new ones.
It’s definitely a significant style shift, but focusing just on the newer style allows me to do a lot more work in a lot less time, allowing me to focus on other parts of development and making it easy to add in a handful more images without too much effort.