3 options for the desert eagle dragon illustration.

I struggled to name this one, I wanted to call it ‘ceremonial dragon’ but I needed a role rather than an adjective. I thought of it as a high-ranking military officers sidearm, but all the officer titles seemed a bit obscure and tenuous. As I had picked out ‘Yakuza’ for the black iteration which generally refers to the Japanese mafia - a ‘family boss’ would be fitting for a cleaner and more prestigious colour scheme, so I went with ‘Kumicho’ - which is a slightly cooler word in english than ‘Oyabun’.



This was the original design and I was worried that a goldish looking metallic would automatically discount it, but the Man-O-War proved an exception to that rule so I rolled with it. Early on I did an audit of the colours of the existing Desert Eagle Skins already in the game - and there wasn’t a purple one yet - which is a very regal colour. Rather than apply it flat I wanted a textured look to the base, so I looked to crushed velvet. I used the underlying UV base as a tonal map and applied a brown to purple colour map over the top with some noise diffuse. I then made the whole illustration a metallic yellow before deciding it needed to look a bit more appealing to the audience - so introduced an orange fade toward the rear of the gun. The hue now resembles fire, like the Japanese ‘Ka Ryu’ dragon.



This is the spiritual successor to the Double or ‘Dueling Dragons’ skin, but my feeling was that there were already a few black desert eagles already in the game, so I made alternative schemes. I had to make a compromise with the wood grip as there is an AO map applied with a leather texture that there is no way to work around making whatever is in the diffuse look dirty, so instead of fight it I worked with it, and used this same tonal detail making the grip leather instead. The Berettas are custom paint with an alpha cutting through to the base - that didn’t work as effective with the DE model - but to make the grip get that nice exponent highlight it made sense to go with Patina regardless. I did experiment briefly with the Gunsmith application method but couldn’t get on with the pixelated exponent map once it wears down, so played it safe.

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The UV has a few issues in Patina mode which I’ve accepted in favour of the metallic finish. The front end of the barrel has a large out of place triangle area that you can’t paint - I tried to place an approximate colour here so it didn’t stand out too much but the light exponent still makes it noticable. Also the magazine has 3 weird polygon areas outside of user control - I’ve attempted to blend an approximate middle-ground colour again to make it less noticeable. (Also rather interestingly the lower right magazine area in the UV is wasted space as the top left polygons are mirrored!)

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All feedback is welcome so please comment below!
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New addition to the series!