As the Zeus is the newest weapon accepting workshop submissions I made it next on my list. I also wanted to learn substance painter as although I had used it in the past it was only for the purpose of creating height-to-normal maps in csgo, so this was essentially a learning exercise!

I researched different creatures associated with electricity and the most interesting one to me was the thunderbird, a mythical creature from native indian folklore that captures whales by throwing lightning snakes at them.

This covered the subject matter, as to the illustrative style I did some very rudimentary tests early on to mimic the traditional artstyle but I felt that the rendered iteration I had done was more fun and dynamic, admittedly it is less authentic but at the end of the day I have to go with what I feel works best. In addition to the more casual illustrative style, I made the wings jagged like lighting bolts to differentiate it from a typical looking bird.

I made a symbol for the player facing part of the weapon featuring a bird carying a whale, a bird-man creature for the top of the weapon in an arrangement similar to a totem pole (the thunderbird is often depicted with a human face on its body), a crazed-mask face for the front of the weapon, channelling the emotional state of a player hiding behind a wall anticipating an unsuspecting victim 'Spagett'-style. It has a middle tooth just like Tom Cruise, I quite liked it so left it that way.

For the colours the starting point were some wooden mask reference I found featuring teal paint, it reminded me of ‘Thunderbird 2’ from the Gerry Anderson TV series. It worked nicely on a brown background accompanied by a deep blue. I wanted to make both the blue and brown even darker but the PBR validation limit kept highlighting, so its set at the max allowable setting. To get the inner blue outline to pass I made it the same colour as the validation highlight so it can’t fail. (thats a half-joke).

I added more saturation to the orange outline for vibrancy and added a few minor gradients to the teal and orange just for extra visual interest.

The most interesting part was playing with the roughness maps to add visual details. I added a halftone dot pattern to the main bird illustration, and also some triangle pattern highlights to the darker front part. I used the same halftone dot pattern to add wear beyond field-tested, so the overal illustration remains intact but clearly has wear for differentiation between the latter wear states.

As to the background material I deliberated on whether it should be made of wood, or plastic. Wood would allude to the subject matter and have much more detail, whereas plastic alludes to the manufacturing process of the taser itself. In the end I stuck with plastic as it felt more in keeping with realistic production methods. As a substitute for the missed added texture detail I added some navajo symbols to the background for detail which are based on the ‘medicine man’ symbol with navajo-weave triangle patterns, the trigger also features a tiny hidden ‘good luck’ spider symbol on the front which is only visible in factory new.

Annoyingly there is some UV overlap (the base of the handle and the charge meter, which is actually a separate mesh sharing the same base texture), but I cant do anything about that so I kept the bottom simple.

Let me know any feedback below.