3 options for the desert eagle dragon illustration.

This was the original design and I was worried that a goldish looking metallic would automatically discount it, but the Man-O-War proved an exception to that rule so I rolled with it. Early on I did an audit of the colours of the existing Desert Eagle Skins already in the game - and there wasn’t a purple one yet - which is a very regal colour. Rather than apply it flat I wanted a textured look to the base, so I looked to crushed velvet. I used the underlying UV base as a tonal map and applied a brown to purple colour map over the top with some noise diffuse. I then made the whole illustration a metallic yellow before deciding it needed to look a bit more appealing to the audience - so introduced an orange fade toward the rear of the gun. The hue now resembles fire, like the Japanese ‘Ka Ryu’ dragon.



I struggled to name this one, I wanted to call it ‘ceremonial dragon’ but I needed a role rather than an adjective. I thought of it as a high-ranking military officers sidearm, but all the officer titles seemed a bit obscure and tenuous. As I had picked out ‘Yakuza’ for the black iteration which generally refers to the Japanese mafia - a ‘family boss’ would be fitting for a cleaner and more prestigious colour scheme, so I went with ‘Kumicho’ - which is a slightly cooler word in english than ‘Oyabun’.



This is the spiritual successor to the Double or ‘Dueling Dragons’ skin, but my feeling was that there were already a few black desert eagles already in the game, so I made alternative schemes. I had to make a compromise with the wood grip as there is an AO map applied with a leather texture that there is no way to work around making whatever is in the diffuse look dirty, so instead of fight it I worked with it, and used this same tonal detail making the grip leather instead. The Berettas are custom paint with an alpha cutting through to the base - that didn’t work as effective with the DE model - but to make the grip get that nice exponent highlight it made sense to go with Patina regardless. I did experiment briefly with the Gunsmith application method but couldn’t get on with the pixelated exponent map once it wears down, so played it safe.

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The UV has a few issues in Patina mode which I’ve accepted in favour of the metallic finish. The front end of the barrel has a large out of place triangle area that you can’t paint - I tried to place an approximate colour here so it didn’t stand out too much but the light exponent still makes it noticable. Also the magazine has 3 weird polygon areas outside of user control - I’ve attempted to blend an approximate middle-ground colour again to make it less noticeable. (Also rather interestingly the lower right magazine area in the UV is wasted space as the top left polygons are mirrored!)

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All feedback is welcome so please comment below!
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New addition to the series!