v2b] The magazine with the paint on looked a little weird when I tried it ingame, so I alpha'd it out.

v2] I've reworked the grip to tie in better with main illustration and to bypass the mirrored text problems, it now looks better integrated. I got the idea after looking at the lowercase Gamma symbol and noticed the form was similar to a pair of pliers - so I drew a dragon clamped by the head then worked it into the grip better by engraving it and applying a touch of silver ink to highlight the dragon. Visuals updated!

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This project has been a roller coaster for me, the end result is far from it’s intended final form - but I’ll talk through the thought process.

Originally my plan was to make an authentic looking pair of Berettas. The Beretta 92F is iconic in film - Bruce Willis brandish one in Die hard, and Mel Gibson used one (the exact same gun in fact) in Lethal weapon.

So I put a vanilla version together relatively quickly; personally I was pretty happy with the vanilla gun skin: the main selling point was the wood grip which actually is my coffee table surface, next is the emblem which at this early stage was a different being a visual nod to the seal of the USA. Everything else was standard Photoshop fudging. But then several opposing thoughts crossed my mind - the first was that I couldn’t just release a standard looking weapon in the workshop as I think my followers expect more creative ideas from me, and secondly if it was to become a technically accurate looking weapon without any creative elements then Valve could easily put that together themselves.



So to add that extra bit of interest I thought about adding an illustrative element to the skin. Dragons seem to be very popular - there’s already a dragon lore and fire serpent skin, and this combined with Riggs backstory from Lethal Weapon lead me to a Vietnam theme. I read a bit about different Asian styled dragons and their cultural significance - there are several different periods which determine the form of the dragon, but the style that appealed to me the most were the crocodile headed serpents with fish scales and rooster legs. I researched the form heavily and then sketched a dragon in my own style specifically positioned to flow across the UV mesh.

At this point I had another great idea - by using a vector outline illustration style I could have the best of both worlds: the gun could start off looking like a standard ‘vanilla’ weapon, but as more wear is applied the dragon illustration could appear in the worn areas using the alpha channel — this would solve two problems at once and be super interesting in that it could potentially flip the market values between factory new and battle scarred on their heads. But alas - it didn’t work to a standard I was satisfied with: I eventually got the design to a point where 'factory new' looked pristine, 'battle scarred' looked really cool with the etched out dragon — but all the wears in between looked abysmal. This is because wear is linear and can only be offset by tone values in the alpha, if it was like stickers you could use several variables to fine tune the point that wear kicks in and ends, but after trying to manually edit the text file to incorporate these strings I discovered there was no effect. So this whole process was sadly aborted as I didn’t want to punish 60% of the skin owners should it get approved (that is if the 'item wear' at point of creation is equally distributed between the 5 wear states.)

At this late stage it became a coin flip about whether to use the dragon or not, I decided with as I’d spent a stupid amount of time fiddling with it getting it right. I incorporated it in the alpha channel. I always like to work with shiny exponent effects but the custom paint application doesn’t allow you much flexibility, Patina and Anodised Metallic applications do but don’t allow you access to the grip, barrel and lower frame… however I improvised here by using the custom paint application method with the alpha to cut right through to the model texture, which revealed the underlying base metal surface which does feature a high exponent. Not a perfect solution, but shiny nonetheless!

Now I had to tie the theme together - I replaced the USA stylised Seal and made up an unofficial special forces logo that nods to Colonel Kurtz backstory in Apocalypse now. Kurtz eventually joined special forces after several applications and served a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign in Vietnam through the Gamma project before going 'off book' and setting up his own barbaric tribe. This was a last minute change so I might rework it to look more slick - but in theory that’s what it alludes to. Let’s just deem the fact that the Beretta wasn’t mass produced for another 9 years as creative licence! As mentioned at the top of the doc I replaced the grip graphics - now its a dragon wrapped around a pair of pliers, solved many problems such as mirroring and looks much better!

As you got to the end of that drivel here's some other names I came up with:
Kurtz
Charlie don’t Smurf
(This is) Flaming dragon