Oh my goodness, you really liked the neon galaxy version of the anemoia, thank you so much for the wonderful response on that! It really warmed my heart to hear you guys loved it so much.

I wanted to make a night version aswell, one that would be a nice shade of blue with some pretty stars. I had the idea of adding a northern light, but as you can see in the images, there is none. I played around with it and went through quite a lot of version where I drew different sorts of northern lights, but none of them really complemented the body that much. After thinking I found the one I liked best, I decided to take images for the workshop submission but as I was taking pictures I started to dislike it more and more.

I decided to cut the northern lights, just have it be a more simple version while still looking rather cool. This will also make it fall more in line with the originally intended restricted rarity! I like this colour combination a lot as well. I really hope you do too!


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