Inspect GIF took away some of the colour info on the camo pattern. See pictures in the carrousel for a better colour representation :)


I am back with a new skin for CS:GO. Today I would like to show you my first weapon in the Livesawn collection. Back in 2018 I started with an M249 skin that instead of metal grips, had nice wooden grips. However, as I got more busy with university I forgot about this skin and focussed on my study. Recently I decided to dig up my old projects and see if there was something which I wanted to recreate and see if I could improve them now that I am more comfortable using Substance Painter. The result is this M249 Livesawn. With wooden grips, metal and a camouflage pattern. I hope you like it. Also, a big thanks to Quzga for the feedback while making this finish! :)


So here is a very old picture of what I found when I opened my project from 2018.



A somewhat weird, old looking gun with vents on the side. Not much was done to it so I decided to see what I could do. I started out with Substance Painter and masking which area's I wanted to be wood, metal and camouflage. Thanks to substance painter this process now goes a lot smoother than me trying to select every UV bit by hand in Photoshop. After I had the basic look of the gun I knew it was time to do something about the magazine.

I am not too great with the M249's magazine. Everything I try always looks kinda cheap and tacky in my eyes and I just don't end up liking the looks. This time I had the power of my rather mediocore 3D Modelling on my side though which allowed to quickly sketch some stuff up. For the first time I decided to make a high poly version of a part of the weapon instead of working with the models provided by Valve. Luckily the geometry of the magazine was quite simple to model so this was not as much of an issue as I thought. The results in the normal map were quite pleasing though, and I definitely understand the appeal of remodelling the whole gun and then baking it down onto the low poly model.



Anyways, I started with all sorts of magazine designs, some of which I thought were pretty cool, some which I thought we're really bad. But luckily I was going through some old sketches and I found a picture I took of a sketch I made back in May 2019 of a magazine idea which I thought could be pretty cool. After I modelled the geometry onto the gun I was finally happy with what it looked like and I was able to call the front bit of the magazine box done. The other part of the box was something which just naturally came together, and the design I ended up with looks pretty nice in my opinion.



Lastly came with the bandage on the back and the pistol grip. I intially started out with a very basic carved grip as you can see on the left. But after a while I decided to go for a simple grip patch which turned out nicely. Then I drew the wrap on the back stock of the weapon for a little extra bit that tied the design together a bit more. This ended up lining up with where the CT and T models hold the guns in the buy menu, which is a nice little happy accident.




I think this M249 is a nice addition to my workshop and I am excited to try out this idea on a couple more guns and see where it takes me. I hope you like the looks of this weapon, even though it might not be your go to choice of gun.

In the meantime, stay healthy, make sure to wash your hands, play some CS:GO and look after yourselves! :)

Love,

Hollandje