Gaia Concept Character

Had an awesome time working on this concept character, bringing together custom effects like volumetric clouds and reactive city lights that shift based on the world lighting around her and are lightweight to work for a game model.
To start off, I kitbashed existing Fortnite skin assets. I cleaned up the base mesh topology and UV-unwrapped the new model before creating a procedural world terrain shader that I later baked into PBR textures. I followed this up by creating a landmass mask and drove the strength of the custom city-lights texture using shadow masking. For both the clouds and the ethereal atmospheric glow, I utilized a mesh-shell technique with a distance falloff for glow strength, alongside procedural cloud plumes and volumetric shapes to keep the clouds lightweight and bound to the armature movement while appearing fluffy.