The AION 2 creator is one of the deepest character editors NCSOFT has shipped, and it is easy to sink an hour into it before you ever see the world of Atreia. The editor is built on Unreal Engine 5, renders your character in real time, and covers what NC advertises as over 200 customization options spanning face, hair, makeup, tattoos and body proportions.
Quick answer: Pick a preset first, then edit in this order — Face, Hair, Style, Body — and check the result under Colored Light and in a full armor set before you confirm.
Where character creation happens and what it covers
You reach the editor at the very start of a new character, after you have already committed to a faction, race and class. The top level of the screen handles the broad strokes, and those settings sit above everything else you tweak later.
- Gender selection for your chosen class
- Skin color palette plus skin gloss sliders
- Voice options
- Outfit preview
- Lighting controls for the preview stage
The model is fully rotatable and updates as you drag, so what you see on the creation stage is close to what you get in gameplay. That matters, because the individual menus below go very granular, very fast.
Build order that keeps you from redoing work
Presets: the fastest starting point
Presets cover both face and body, and the range is wider than the usual handful of generic templates. You can cycle from conventional human faces to elf-like features, heavily muscled builds, elderly faces, and outright demonic archetypes. Each one remains fully editable afterwards, so treat a preset as a base mesh rather than a final answer.
Presets are organized to line up with race, gender and role, so if you want a character who reads as a frontline fighter or a caster at a glance, the matching preset already carries most of that look.
Face sliders in AION 2, menu by menu
The Face tab is the largest part of the editor. It is split into menus, and several of them use a morph grid — a two-axis pad you drag — instead of single sliders, which lets you move a feature in two directions at once.
| Menu | Main controls |
|---|---|
| Shape | Face shape, face type, morph grid |
| Ears | Standard or Pointy, position grid, size, rotation, earlobe length |
| Jaw and cheeks | Chin Shape, Side Jawline, Lower Jaw Shape, Jaw Protrusion, cheek and cheekbone, forehead, Brow Bone Position |
| Eyes | Size, position grid, depth, rotation, inner and outer corner width and height, eyelid position |
| Eyebrows | Shape, size, color, intensity, position, gloss, angle |
| Eyelashes | Shape, length, color area, default color, angle, upper and lower intensity |
| Nose | Size, length, tip height and position, root position and height, bridge height and position, nostril width and position |
| Mouth | Position and size grid, upper and lower lip width, center and outer thickness, lip position, angle, corner position and depth, protrusion |
Eyes are worth the most attention, because they carry the character’s expression at normal camera distance. Beyond size and position, you get eye depth, rotation, separate width and height controls for the inner and outer corners, and independent upper and lower eyelid position.
Iris, pupil and sclera options
The eyeball menu is where AION 2 leans into fantasy. You can set a basic iris shape, then adjust iris size along with separate center and border colors. Pupils have their own shape list — including non-natural shapes such as hearts — plus size and color, and there are controls for eye shine and sclera color on top.
Asymmetrical eye controls let you give each eye different settings, which is the straightforward way to build a heterochromatic or partially scarred look.
Hair styles, two-tone dye and gloss
Hairstyles are picked from a preset list, and the coloring happens in a separate Dye menu. You can stay on a single Default color or switch to Two-Tone Dye, which adds a second color plus a Two-Tone Dye Area control that decides how much of the hair the second shade covers. Dye Contrast sets how sharply the two colors separate, and Hair Gloss controls how much light the strands catch.
Style tab: makeup, tattoos, war paint and scars
Everything painted onto the skin lives in the Style tab, and most entries share the same pattern — a shape, a color, an intensity value and a gloss or reflection setting. A detail mode exposes the finer options such as highlighter placement.
- Skin and contour — contour shape, color, intensity, gloss and highlighter
- Eyeliner — shape, color, intensity, gloss, reflection
- Eyeshadow — shape, color, intensity, glitter distribution and color, particle size, opacity, reflection
- Lips — shape, color, intensity, gloss, reflection, glitter settings and lip detail
- Moles and freckles — shape, color, intensity, plus a position grid for moles
- Facial hair — stubble type and intensity, facial hair type and color
Tattoos, war paint and scars
Tattoos are not limited to the face. You can place a tattoo shape on the chest, back, arms and legs, then set its color, position, size and rotation, with a symmetry option for mirrored designs. War paint patterns and face art sit alongside them for a more tribal or ritual look.
Scars get their own set of controls — scar type, position, size, rotation and Scar Depth, which decides how pronounced the mark reads on the model.
Body shape sliders, from head size to calf thickness
The Body Shape tab starts with its own preset list, then breaks the model down by region. Height, Build and Width are the global controls, and there is a Vein Intensity slider for how visible veins are on the skin.
| Region | Sliders |
|---|---|
| Head and neck | Head Size, Neck Thickness, Neck Length |
| Arms and hands | Upper and lower arm length, overall arm thickness, triceps, biceps, forearm, hand size, finger length and thickness, arm muscle definition |
| Torso | Shoulder Size, Trapezius Size, Rib Cage Size and Length, Chest Muscle, Back Muscle, waist circumference and length, Belly Protrusion, Abdominal Definition |
| Lower body | Hip Size, leg thickness, thigh length and thickness, calf length and thickness, Foot Width, leg muscle definition |
Muscle definition is a separate axis from thickness, so you can build a lean, cut frame or a bulky one with soft definition. That distinction is the main reason two characters with identical height and build can still look nothing alike.
Preview tools to check your character before confirming
A face that looks right on the default creation stage can fall apart under different lighting or behind a helmet. The editor includes tools specifically for catching that.
- Outfit preview, which drops the character into full armor sets
- Colored Light environments for testing skin tone and makeup under different lighting
- Lift Hair, to see the face with the hairstyle pulled clear
- A UI hide function for a clean look at the model
- Face Camera, which pushes the view in close
You know the character is finished when it still holds up in all three states — close up with Face Camera, under a strong colored light, and in a full armor set rather than the default creation outfit. If skin gloss blows out under colored lighting or contour disappears at normal camera distance, dial those back before you commit.
One last habit worth picking up before you hit confirm: cycle your finished character through the class selection screen. Seeing the same face and body on a Gladiator, Ranger, Spiritmaster, Cleric, Chanter or Assassin shows you how the silhouette reads with each weapon and armor weight, and it is the cheapest sanity check available. NCSOFT has not detailed how appearance changes work after creation, so treat what you confirm here as the look you will be playing with for a while.
