The MP5 was my default buy when counter-strike was in beta, and many users have been asking for it for since it was replaced by the MP7. To me the recent update is about servicing nostalgia. This instantly made me think of the Evil Daimyo - as this was my first weapon skin that was accepted into CSGO and the one I get nostalgic over. I paired the two up, and just like the devs opted for a slight change in using the MP5SD3 model, I have tweaked the original design by incorporating a normal map to some areas of detail.

It has been difficult revisiting the daimyo in the past as I have transitioned from a print-optimised mac environment to a web optimised PC one meaning colour profile issues resulting in unintentional colour space variance. Ultimately this time around I’ve gone with the TGA values of the original for the most part - and amended them where the design benefitted.

Three days ago I was only planning on releasing the Evil Daimyo as it was my favourite, but during testing I started to sway toward an orange option. Then I remembered last time I was working on the five-seven I initially created and submitted a magenta design - later decided it was off brand prompting me to create two on-brand ‘Evil’ options; Valve went with the purple one.... perhaps when narrowing down submissions to cases the devs are after a specific weapon, tier and colour, so there is nothing to lose by submitting a range of colours, so long as its manageable and you think they all work.

The alternative accents I could rationalise in my mind were warm-orange, acid yellow, turquoise, and magenta. Turquoise felt right as its a silenced weapon so more calm and collected. Both orange and magenta fit as they are loud and angry hues much like red, magenta is perhaps the weakest but included as its one of the most underrepresented hues. Yellow I had two shades for initially but felt the warmer one wasnt different enough from orange, and the greener yellow felt more acerbic, cutting and sharp - the right emotional terms for a bitter embodiment. Two of these recolours were relatively easily made with adjustment layers, however the others I had to manually create as some shades looked dirty.

I was interested to see how Valve would create a model specifically for multiple finishes as that was never the intention with the original hidden path assets, ultimately many models have technical issues such as UV poly-duplication, projection issues/distortion and prohibitive AO. Unfortunately the MP5SD was not an exception! -- there were some minor hiccups, notably: projection issues (side projection) on the rear of the grip handle and above it, AO overriding any albedo detail on the facing forestock ‘ring’, and heavily unsymmetrical AO on the magazine - the right side is casted in shadow, but this can be counteracted to a degree with the right layers adjustments. Most of the technical issues I was able to overcome either by removing detail in these areas. On the positive side there appeared to be a lot more polys meaning higher definition geometry -- the actual model looks great; and the AO did not feature baked text to manually override in the albedo which is a nice bonus.

Let me know if you like the Daimyo for this model and which colour you prefer! Also if you would like to see more Daimyos on other weapons -- I enjoy making these as its half following a set of rules, and half making exceptions based on restraints from the model / technical issues.







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