Do you ever get a nostalgic feeling for a time you've never known? Yea me too, and that phenomena is called Anemoia, the name of this skin. The M4A4 Anemoia is a skin which took me around 1.5 months to make because it was not just making a skin. It was my first time trying to figure out how to work with Substance Painter. I have always been pretty basic when it came to the software I used to creating skins, Photoshop, 3DCoat, and perhaps Substance Designer, but I feel like it is time to learn some new things, incorporate new software in my design process. This is exactly what I did with this skin, let me give you a quick recap of the past 1.5 months.


So I started out with inspiration. The CZ-75 Cerakote by Teo is an amazing style which I really really liked. The Cerakote finish gives this awesome effect to weapons which I just instantly fell in love with. I was already working on a silhouette pattern but had a hard time applying a pattern to weapons because of the restrictions with planar mapping. Therefore I decided to bite the bullet and start out with a completely new custom skin and theme.

I started out with having a basic sketch of the soldiers and the ground. Added an orange/red gradient background and opened Substance Painter. I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at, it was more different than substance Designer than I initially expected. Slowly but surely I started getting the hang of things and started masking area's out where I wanted paint and plastic/metal. I loaded in the basic sketch and decided that I was going to take this idea further, I liked where it was going.

I sketched some mountains in next. This was because I wanted there to be a story that the soldiers are out in no-mans land trying to find theIR way in new grounds. The mountains took me some time to sketch because I was quite rusty and didn't really have plan in mind. Once the mountains got to a point where I liked them I started shifting my attention towards the actual look of the paint. At this point in time it was just a layer of colour, nothing more than that.

I started playing around with smart masks, and ended up creating most of my own smart masks. I realized that baking from the low poly model created some errors in a lot of the maps so I spend some time fixing these. Then a long process of making the material look the way it does now. I won't bore you with the specifics of that but I slowly started to get the hang of how substance painter works.

Then I added some more new things into my workflow. I decided to 3D model some details onto the magazine because I was curious how it worked and if I were able to do so. Sure they're simple shapes and nothing super mind blowing, but I like the way it looks and how well the 3D geometry got baked down on a 2D map.

The drawings were starting to worry me a bit, it seemed rather empty near the mountains and I didn't quite know what to do with them. Luckily my girlfriend mentioned that it could be cool to have a paratrooper coming in from the sky and with that in mind I drew a plane dropping cargo which was to be retrieved by these soldiers. Sadly enough the plane is covered by the nametag but I didn't want to put the plane higher on the weapon because it would mess too much with the perspective.

Then finally it was time for the wear. Before I would always wear the weapon at the newest point of factory new, but I heard from some people that it was quite annoying because it would make it super hard to get a non-scratched version of my skins. Therefore I decided to be a bit more chill with the wear and have 0.00 till 0.02 be a true factory new skin. After that wear will come in as usual.


It was quite a journey to say the least, but I ended up with a design which I really enjoy. It gives you a sense of a journey you're about to embark upon or a feeling of anemoia. I hope that my hard work reflects what I present here. This design is something that I definitely want to take further, for starters, a night version could look really cool so I'm going to look into that. Now that I am more comfortable with making these types of finishes I am going to play around more with different ideas and perhaps even revisit some old ones.

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

love

Hollandje