I am 20 days late with this but I want to wish everyone a happy 2017! This is my first submission of the year and it is quite a special one if I may say so myself. I have been working on a lot of different types of skins in the past few months but this one is pretty new for me. What is so different about this submission? Well as you can see I have decided to change some metal parts with wood for a new look and damn what was that fun. Once most metal was replaced with wood I ended up with what felt like a completely different weapon and it looked surprisingly nice if I may say so myself. This weapon is made with the mil-spec/restricted rarity in mind.


Like I said this was mostly experimenting. Aside from changing the type of wood on a sawed-off skin I never really took the time to change metal parts to wood. The wood material is mainly made in Substance Designer 5, a wonderful program that makes you create materials from scratch. After I made a base wood material I added some more details in Photoshop and I was ready to apply it to the geometry. The back part of the TEC-9 was quite a pickle in terms of projection since on the UV sheet it's in different parts with different sized UV islands. After some fiddling in 3D Coat I manged to get it right and was left with a nicely applied wood material. I then played around with the colours since I started out with a very light type of wood which looked atrocious.[i.imgur.com]

After I was done with the wood I added some slight wear and tear around it and moved over to the rust. This Corroden is the first to have a less rusty body. This has to do with the wood since having a lot of saturated rust does not really match well with it. By having this slight green-ish metal and rust it really fit together nicely. I then added a little bit of paint here and there and decided to add some little easter eggs to the gun for the community to find :). Then I looked at what I wanted with the wear and created an Alpha channel that fulfilled my needs.


In terms of wear it is not something special. I went for a gunsmith finish because I wanted the metal to turn darker the more the weapon got worn. I decided to not make the wood scratch of since that would ruin the realism, instead it turns slightly darker. To still make sure there are differences between Factory New and Field-Tested I edited some alpha values of the magazine and ejector port. The ejector port is the most interesting since this part of the weapon is very hard to get scratchless even with a float value of 0.00x. The top of the magazine starts wearing when the weapon reaches it field-tested state and is completely worn when it reaches battle-scarred.


This was a really fun skin to create and I am 100% sure that I will continue working with wood to create more of these finishes. I really hope you guys enjoy the skin as much as I do and if you do please let Valve know by pressing the Yes button below the image carousel. I am also planning to start a tutorial series where I will try to explain how to make weapon skins and shed light on what goes into creating weapon skins. This will most likely be happening when I have some more time on my hands since I have a lot of uni work to do in the upcoming few weeks.

Thank you for reading!

Hollandje :))