Mara Sov – Squadmate [WOTC]

This mod is my attempt to port Mara Sov from Destiny 2 to XCOM. It is functional as is, and contains all her current assets in a usable state. This mod is only for the WOTC expansion, and there are no plans for a vanilla version.
This was intended to be used in tandem with the voice mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3012693887

This mod contains all of Mara’s assets from D2, including her head (regular and tintable), arms (seperate), arm guards, shoulder pauldron, fur pauldron, torso clothes, belt and ‘kilt'(?), legs, and knife/leg holster. To use her head, make sure that you use ‘Race 0’. It goes without saying that everything in this mod is a female asset. Soldiers, reapers, skirmishers, and templars are all supported, as well as all armor tiers. Face tattoos are unfortunately NOT supported. The individual pieces are somewhat modular – however, the best use case is just using all of them together.

I would highly recommend the use of the following mods:

• Invisible Body Parts: soft requirement for seeing all customization options (EDIT: thank you Max for the correction on this one)
• One Million Colours: if you plan on using the tintable parts

While you technically do not need any or all of the above for this mod to function, I would still advise that you use them.

EDIT: this mod now also contains Mara’s D1 assets. Pretty much all of the above applies to the D1 assets.

I can’t think of a reason why this mod would be incompatible with any others (like most cosmetic mods).

• November 6, 2023: improved/fixed some geometery and weights for D2 and D1 assets.
• October 27, 2023: added D1 assets, fixed texture compression for D2 assets. Sorry about that, D2 assets should look better now.

There are some things I would like to fix and add, but don’t know if/when I can get around to it.

• Add tintable clothing parts. I tried this earlier, but ran into a couple issues and decided to shelve it for later.
• Add hair physics to Mara’s hair. No idea on how feasible this is, but it would be pretty cool.
• DONE – Add D1 version assets. Her model changed a fair bit between D1 and D2, and I think it’d be neat to have both versions. Should be pretty straightforward as well.
• Support facial tattoos. Don’t really know anything about this process.

While I may end up adding content to this mod, I will be careful when tweaking existing cosmetics, and I do not plan on ever removing content.

There are a number of things that could be fixed or improved, but either haven’t gotten around to it or have deemed it too difficult (for now).

• Head weight painting could be better. It’s more noticable in more expressive facial poses. This is a real pain to get right, however.
• Eyelash material is a bit off – I can’t seem to get it right with the D2 assets. May decide to switch to XCOM’s eyelashes, but that will also take some work.
• Hair roots float a tiny bit above the scalp of all heads. Can’t seem to get it quite right – it’s close enough for me.
• Skin on the hands is wrong – this is fixable, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. It isn’t distracting enough to warrant an immediate fix.
• Bottom of shirt geometry is quite scuffed. Her model in D2 is hard to work with in this area, so it required me to make some quick modifications that aren’t very clean.
• Head skin color (for the tintable head) doesn’t match the skin color of default bare skin (for the torso/legs/arms). I decided to mute the skin color on the face so that it is less saturated and weird, but this means that it will not match the skin material elsewhere.
• Discontinuous skin texture around the neckline. This is because the D2 head only has part of the neck – to get the full XCOM head, I needed to add more neck. In the interest of time, I did not properly match the UVs of the added geometry.
• Some connections (arm-torso, head-torso) are slightly off when combined with other base game cosmetics. It’s not super noticable for most pieces, but it’s not perfect.

As you can tell from the list above, this is far from a flawless mod. Hopefully, you will find it to be ‘good enough’. Most of the issues stem from edges cases, so if you just want to have Mara Sov in your squad as she appears in Destiny, this mod should suffice.

You are free to use the contents of this mod as you see fit – however, you are still bound under Bungie’s terms for the usage of their assets.

I started making this mod because I needed a side project, I had always wanted to make a mod for this game, and it combines 2 games that I play a lot. However the real reasons why this mod exists are the following:

• Bungie: the creators of the Destiny IP and being willing to allow creations such as this.
• Destiny Model Rips: the original rippers of the assets in this mod, and the reason that I understand how to use those assets.
• E3245: for his guide on textures and materials in XCOM, and for answering one of my dumb questions.
• Kexx: for his guide on how to set up port assets and showing his own process.
• Iridar: for his guide on how to properly cook assets (how this mod doesn’t take up a ton of space).
• So many more modders that have made XCOM such a replayable game for me and many others.