In Norse Mythology, Huginn and Muninn are Odins ravens. He used them as spys throughout the nine realms.

The origins of this idea are rooted in the Norse collection. Many years ago I was asked to pitch multiple ideas to Valve, and ultimately it was the Gungnir that sparked with the team. Potentially I could have produced more finishes but I work extremely slowly and agreed only to a limited amount of finishes. Despite this self imposed limit, I think that many of the ideas I didnt have time to develop further still had wings. Especially the huginn and muninn option, which originally I sketched for the M4A4, but later on felt it would be perfect for the dual berettas as its the only weapon in the game where you have two guns – one for each of Odins birds – but also because the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ hammers could be made to look like beaks.

A few years ago I did recycle this idea whilst retaining some distance to the norse theme and created the ‘birds of war’ for csgo. perhaps the aesthetic was too simple and gimicky. But the underlying idea of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ hammers as beaks was strong enough not to need to tie it in with anything else.

In my mind I did plan to do a second version at some point with a darker and more refined aesthetic, but normally by the time I finish a skin I’m so fed up of working on it that I feel the need to move on and work on something else… With the advent of CS2 I went through my old list of ideas, and I really wanted to see where this idea would go, enough time had passed for it to be interesting to me again, so I put it to the top of the list.

If the hammers as beaks are the main idea, the secondary part was to attempt to make feathers stand out like facets so they break up the light reflection as you hold the weapon. But also to try and mimic the subtle iridescence observed on raven feathers. The introduction of the pearlescence effect coincidently added at the time the norse collection was released added further weight to me picking this as an idea to push forwards.

The problem I had was ‘how to do it’, as I’m a relative novice in 3D. In the past I’ve mainly created height maps and converted them to normals, which is a roundabout way of doing it but a bit of a bodge in that it adds surface detail to existing faces – but not so much for altering the perceived direction of the underlying faces. I’m not at a confidence level where I can create a High poly model from a low poly model, but in the end I didn't need to. By chance I found a video about floating geometry, whereby instead of altering the low-poly model, you simply add bits of extra geometry to the top of the low poly, and then bake it onto the surface. It wasn't perfect, and I spent a long time correcting nasty edges and bizarrely warped surfaces in the bake using substance painter afterwards, in which the substance painter application had its own set of bugs to fight with (which are still not yet fixed by adobe), but I believe I got an ok result through this method.

As to the iridescence, I couldn't achieve the result I wanted due to the PBR validator ruling out anything too dark. What I wanted to achieve was dark feathers that reflected brightly and shifted in hue as they caught the light. With the prohibition of all dark tones in designated metallic areas I was pushed into making the entire surface a midtone instead. I also wanted the colour to shift through the wear states, so the base colour channel could not be overly saturated in order to be heavily influenced with the chosen patina colours. As you can see from one of the animated slides: factory new is a salient purple, field-tested is duller and more blue, and battle-scarred is an almost green-cyan.

There is some pearlescence applied on top, with a little bit of experimentation in the pearlescence map over the feather shapes for variation. I used the AO channel as a way of getting around the validator by adding more darkness to areas that should be naturally light.

I added some ‘knotwork’ line detail to fill vacant spaces with something other than feathers and to reinforce the underlying norse concept.

Using substance painter rather than photoshop and illustrator has made my methods less precise and more crude – I really love working with vectors rather than brushes! But I hope the overall effect I've achieved is a good proof of concept..

Also note that since the last update to CS2 which corrected some phases of knife gammas, the PBR validator marks all metallic areas below a luminosity value of 229 in magenta. Prior to this update it was set much lower, and the skin passed the validator fine. I believe the new update to be a temporarily bugged and so have ignored the new magenta warning.

Let me know any feedback below: