After a lengthy and unintended hiatus I've decided to ease in to things with a previously unexplored fork from the glock weasel development. Before settling on a cute simple weasel illustration I briefly contemplated tying the style to mythical folklore. In japanese mythology there exists a 'Kamaitachi' - a wind borne weasel with razor claws that leaves cuts on its victim but without pain. I paired this up with the M4A1-s as it is a silenced weapon. The M4A1-s also has the option of being unsilenced, so to juxtapose stealth with the conspicuous I added samurai armour inspired elements such as layered padding on the front part of the weapon. Wind I represented with swirls and curved lines. To add more visual interest I've added a mokume gane pattern to the lower receiver, and despite battling limits of resolution -- attempted to give the handle a katana sword hilt.

There are not many green illustrative M4A1-s finishes so I choose that as the accent colour. I've also been experimenting with normal mapping which has slowed me down somewhat, there were some surface effects that were just not achieveable through Normal mapping as it is a perception trick rather than a poly-shifting modification -- which in the very least has informed me the limits for future work.

Another issue I ran into specific to this weapon is the shinyness in Patina/Gunsmith. The exponent settings only ever shifted the metallic effect from flat to a dirty and cheap looking tin; I don't recall any other weapon having this effect to this extent. The front lower receiver above the mag and the rear stock had some kind of dirt appear on it in workbench that I couldn't remove and so have removed some tiny details I intended to include from this area.

I still have some minor reservations about certain areas of design but on the flip side I feel I need to submit to get feedback as I’ve been working on this for several weeks plus I need to start something new. Let me know what you think below!