I started working on a brand new idea for USPS – new ideas are usually more exciting, but in the midst of working it up I asked myself ‘is this visually better than the Nightfire dragon design’, which to date has a staggering 1.4 million unique views [sigh...different times], but also no longer compatible. So in the spirit of putting my best foot forward I decided to prioritise a ‘reforge’ of the Nightfire dragon design.


The previous CS:GO submission



Once you get that many views it becomes mentally difficult to change the design: ‘am I going to disappoint those who liked the original if I have to make modifications?’ Well the fact of the matter is that it has to change. The PBR values for metallics have to validate otherwise it fails by default. Initially my plan was to produce something as close to the old submission as possible; but with a different shader setup my policy changed to reproduce ‘in the same spirit’. If a choice came down to how it looked in the original vs how it works best with the new shading, I opted for the latter. Hamstringing an idea because of archaic limitations is a bad policy.

One noticeable difference is the luminosity values of the base colours are higher. It is no longer dark but much more vibrant. This had further limitations with the Patina tint, as this generally gets darker and dirtier the further the weapon wears so in order for factory new to be as intended there is less discernible change over the wear states in this particular colourscheme, much like the original.

As to the linework, you’d think it was a straightforward job of taking the original illustrative elements and re-projecting them onto the model, in a few cases it was, but in many cases it wasnt due to various proportion changes, and idiosyncrasies that existed on the old mesh that were ironed out on the new one. Also I’m still learning Substance painter, there were many times I’d apply an element, only for it to also be projected onto the magazine/inner parts of the weapon. Cue many investigations into the channels and layers, problem solving visual errors, which in turn became educational in how the channels influence each other.

The old CSGO mesh had uneditable heavy Ambient Occlusion on the grips which forced my hand towards dark grips, the dragon motifs in the albedo were only just about passable by making them overly bright to compensate for this. As I no longer had this limitation, this time around I dabbled in Substance designer for the first time and created these scale patterns with bulbous normals, as such the grip is brighter and cleaner with more interest, but with the effect moderated so that it doesn’t grab all the attention. I mostly wanted them brighter than the originals but darker than they are, however when I did this I noticed in Battle-scarred iterations it would fail the PBR check due to patina tint/grime so this is a compromise, another option was to overload the AO but this looked dirty rather than darker, and increasing the roughness reduced the impact of the reflection and in turn the 3D surface effect which I felt was more important..

I left some welding normal map detail on the silencer to show through. I often prefer this method if the artefacts are functional as to hint to the underlying construction of the component. I did remove the circular indents as they were more of a hindrance to the engraved linework.

It did not escape my mind that there exists a pearlescent mask now should I want it. I did work up an option wih a mask, with some very subtle pearlescence (-1.00), but when comparing the two I didnt feel that it looked better. In my mind I was reminded of cheap kids beach toys that feature it: although the effect can be cool, it can also look cheap and tacky. I didnt want that for this, which I felt looked more pure and clean without.

If anyone has any feedback on this, I absolutely will consider it due to the amount of interest the old version received.