XDefiant: Character Skins - Nova Cognition

Highwaymen Faction - Nova "Cognition" Legendary Skin
XDefiant In-Game Store

Concept work by Mikael Leger:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3EwkXE

Character skin work that I was fully responsible for while at Ubisoft on the FTP shooter XDefiant. Not gonna lie, out of the entirety of my role on XDefiant this was probably my most enjoyable skin to work on. Right around the timing of the release of CDPRs famous title of a similar genre I was fully geeked up the moment my character art Lead Takahashi-san hinted that I would be working on a Cyberpunk-like design again. If you are familiar with my work you already know I am all about dem robots and sci-fi. Wont touch a Souls title but NG+ed "The Surge" no less than 4 times like I was Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow. As soon as this Nova concept hit my inbox I told her, "Say less" and got to work. Previously there were a few tasks to create similar characters that ended up being cut but it was clear this one was staying so I didn't hold back on any detail or effort.

The main feature here of course was capturing an appealing look for android skin; it had to be something that looked as though it could be both strong and resilient for combat but at the same time also feel like it could be dainty and eloquent from finely engineered man-made sub components. Taking a bunch of references from Ghost in the Shell, and the immaculate yet sturdy surface quality of materials seen in films like Battle Angel Alita or shows like Altered Carbon I took liberties again with developing my own shaders. Originally the skin featured a bit of subsurface, transmission, simulated thin layer top coat iridescence and of course emissive. A hexa-triangular pattern with porous corner end-points was indicative of a kind of expandable, modular yet flexible surface. To exaggerate the idea of machinery within the surface or just underneath the skin once again playing around with slight normal map tangent manipulations and parallax offset mapping I had it wired up to have a pulse modulated height map affect to displace some of the thin lit areas and give a since of raw energy/circuitry powering tiny individual surface components below however after departing from the project in the end I believe all those features were cut for the sake of performance. This skin was created and finalized prior to any tech art was freed up to help support character skin development so not surprising that not every feature could be kept for runtime - though it was still a fun experience to develop the look to that extent.

The current in-game look of the skin is reasonably ok for gameplay but its not quite the same look or level of detail as the early development version was. She is available on the XDefiant storefront for the next 3-4 days depending on your time zone. If you are into cyberpunk android GITS sci-fi like things I def recommend taking the opportunity to get her bundle which comes with two clean af gun skins, a player card and a new set of cute respawn screen emojis before the store rotates onto other assets.