XDefiant: Character Skins - Green Spectra

Cleaners Faction - Green "Spectra" Epic Skin
XDefiant Season 1 Battle Pass contents

Character skin work that I completed while working on the FTP shooter XDefiant. Given a very basic concept which seemed to imply themes based on typical Dia de los Muertos style skeletal costume theming I was specifically asked by my Lead Character Artist - Takahashi Yuki san to develop a unique way of re-envisioning such an overplayed, overused style of grunge character costuming. Initial requirements: emissive skeletal theme, Rhinestone/pearl bling accents of some kind, and retaining a tasteful combination of grunge fashion and tactical combat gear. Specifically I was ask not to have the skin's skeleton look like some spray paint over fabric but rather some kind of light based LED look.

I decided to take my love of sci-fi and high-end tech to push the requirements further by emulating a hologram or stereoscopic (depth illusion) effect like suit technology. Without specific direction I created most of this projection illusion design from scratch right in Substance painter for initial approval. Jewel mesh heightmap stamps made in Maya/Arnold renderer. Tech art was unavailable for character support at the time, had to solo-develop two material surface shaders within the engine; a base emissive-only parallax offset mapping (POM) one and a translucency SSS enabled variant. From experience in Unreal, using node graphs in Snowdrop I was able to solo-engineer together both shaders using masks to block out areas where displacement could be used to create the hologram effect under a surface. For gemstones another mask channel texture was also used to reveal a Fresnel-based iridescent thin-coat surface sheen including subsurface scattering, clearcoat roughness, and translucency.

XDefiant's specific build of Snodrop at the time had no thin-coat translucency style base shaders or emissive only POM shaders. Our character skeletal meshes were already decided on and skins texture sets where quite limited on number of materials hence all features needed to be crammed into 2-3 max shaders (excluding hair and eyes). Skin texture creation took about 1-2 weeks, and shader investigations/optimizations took about 2-3 days of development with minimal refinements.

With approval from project leads the Epic grade "Spectra-Stereoscopics" (my own fictional technology brand) skin line was born based off this first Cleaner Green skin.