Updated for CS2 here:




This lead to me breaking the pattern of having the dragon facing away from the player in order for the tail to end at the tip of the weapon - I felt it was an acceptable compromise with the bonus of allowing the 'side' dragon head to be closer to the player. As the illustration would need to appear on both sides of the weapon I’ve made the two tails ‘twine’ around each other, which took a bit of trial and error! As did the reworking of the illustration to dodge all the obstacles such as the safety lever and slide pull, plus all those unexpected UV area issues! Once I had the form nailed down I worked up three options which I'll go through below:



As a more outrageous option I thought about lush purples and deep reds with a fiery orange dragon, hues that are reminiscent of firework displays such as those during the chinese new year. A night attack lends itself to stealth which ties in perfectly to a suppressed weapon. As this one is a mix of hues including a neutral metal for the grip details I’ve not applied a transition so as a compromise this one stays awesome but gets dirtier.




I love this emerald colour as it makes the weapon look like an oriental antique, plus it’s such a mystical colour. I’ve manually added yellowish shifts to the albedo base, and dusty blues in the slide pull. I did try and apply a wear transition shift however the base is so strong that it’s not very noticeable, plus a major shift to either blue or yellow pulled it too far away from lush emerald which wasn't what I wanted; so I opted to keep the shift minimal but mainly affect the brightness. I think it looked best somewhere between Minimal wear and Field tested, however Factory new is more shiny. I’ve made the grip detail copper to harmonise with the green theme.




I was always going to make a metallic-silver one because of the ties to realism making it a ‘safe option’. Much like the (p2000) ‘Kanbu’ dragon I’ve manually created a brushed effect to add surface detail, also a clouded metal effect which has hints of oil shades (blue/yellow). To prevent it looking too muted I’ve added some spectral highlights to the player-facing dragon-head which makes it more interesting. I worked up 4 versions: the one I’m submitting has a purple grip like the (Desert Eagle) ‘Kumicho’ dragon, with a scale grip pattern.


The grip itself I’ve experimented with and made several versions; the one I’ve submitted for both Emerald and Dynasty has a scale texture pattern - in order to achieve this effect I had to manual counteract the AO texture in the albedo itself through painstaking trial and error. A bonus of this is that the grip details for all three versions don’t appear to have the AO pattern applied on top. A downside to this is that the inventory preview animation looks slightly coarse, probably down to downscaling of the AO or a smaller AO texture image - however it's not a factor ingame.

Let me know in the comments below what you think, and which you prefer (if any)!


-