You take the red pill - you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes


It took me more than 3.5 years to finally make an AK-47 skin again. The AK-47 is a weapon that I personally don't really like to make skins for, even though it is pretty much the most popular weapon in the T's arsenal. I don't know what it is, the geometry of the model, the small little details on the body, or something else, but I've always felt like the AK-47 was a weapon which I wasn't able to skin properly. Well, finally I can say that I did end up doing it, I made a proper skin for the AK-47 which I consider cool and original enough to be a unique asset in the game.


I started out with loading the smart material which I have prepared to kickstart the process, nothing is better than working on a canvas that is not blank and doing it this way allows me to quickly catch on again with the style. I started balancing out the colours, and placing the procedural effect to the desired areas on the gun. Luckily for me this worked out rather smoothly. The only thing I ran into was the end of the dust cover where I had to make it blend nicely together with the grey base material for this skin. After I had succesfully worked around this I started playing with the grips.

Now the grips for the AK-47 are wonderful, it is a fun geometry to design for and pretty much anything you do looks rather cool. I went for a classic grip at the front, but for the pistol grip I made 1 patch at the front, and 1 at the back to break up the grip, and at the same time create some space for the grey base material to poke through. This is when I realized that the grey material might need a little extra flair beside the white dust. I jumped into substance designer and quickly made a tileable pattern that fit nicely with the sci-fi theme of the skin. I applied this and it looked a lot better than before. This made me redo the P250, and Famas base material so that I was able to create a uniform style across all guns.


Early WIP November 8th

After the grips were done I started with some of the first person view details. I always enjoy having the Joint Security logo in view so I embossed this on the back of the dust cover. Then there was still the backplate that connected the buttstock to the main body of the AK-47. I was struggling to come up with an idea there, and I felt it would be a waste to leave it blank. This is when I asked my girlfriend to have a look and maybe make some concepts for this area. She made some sketches which I tried and the first one was nice but it still felt like there was something lacking.


One concept for the back plate

She then thought to make it a giant usb stick that stuck into the main body of the AK and I accidentely misinterpreted that idea and create a USB port on the back. Luckily thanks to this happy accident we ended up with a great little nifty design on the plate which amps up the whole sci-fi theme.


Final USB design

After this I just had to finalize some parts here and there, and patch up the skin as a whole to make it looks complete. When this was done I was ready to write my description and publish!

Also a big thank you to Sofia, Andi, Quzga, and Moonfighter for the feedback and ideas while making these skins!


Thanks for checking out my work and I hope you enjoyed the skin! While you're here, why not check out some more of my skins down below?

Love,

Hollandje

The font used in this project is free for commercial use/freeware | UA Cadet[www.fontspace.com]