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, and the alternate colourschemes for it..

The previous CS:GO submission


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.

Thanks to PBR the dynasty dragon has much more reflection, the only drawback is I've had to make the grips lighter due to the PBR validation causing issues at the battlescarred states.

I created the nightfire dragon first, then at a later date created separate versions for the other two options. I was thinking it would take a long time, but the changes were mostly straightforwards. There was a lot of tinkering as its not just a case of changing the basecolour, I had to live test each one and make little adjustments going backwards and forwards between the applications. I felt the dynasty one should have more reflection as it was monochrome, it requires a bit more visual interest.

The grips caused problems. PBR validation meant I could never get the grips dark enough due to the how dark it becomes in the battlescarred state, so the Factory new state is a little bit lighter than I would have wanted, but it looks fine when ingame.

Let me know any feedback below