I’ve already covered the new Pearlescent coating that weapon skins can receive. It
shifts their colours across the colour spectrum, by a customisable amount and chosen direction.
But will older skins ever be updated with this?
I know that, where suitable, older skins have received normalmaps… but pearlescent doesn’t
just emphasise the details of the weapon. It can completely change the look of the weapon!
But I didn’t let that stop me. I tested it out on numerous older skin designs, and
now let me share with you how it went. Starting with the Glock Grinder, since this
feels like a weapon made for pearlescence. And I was right. I think it looks great and
could easily be added into this design without upsetting anybody, since this is clearly what
the finish was meant to look like in the first place. I initially chose a value of -12, which
is enough to cycle through all of the colours, but by unfortunate coincidence this perfectly
cancelled out the rainbow colours along the side, instead swapping them all out for purple.
So I tried again with a huge value of 100, which certainly showed the rainbow, but perhaps
this was going a bit too far since each speck of colour would show several at once. The
‘best’ number is probably somewhere between those two, but I limited myself to 2 attempts
per skin. Let’s move on. Now of course I had to try this XM1014 and
how it would affect 2 bold colours when there aren’t any shades inbetween. My first try
with -8 was a little bit too much, making the curved barrel look like a normalmap! So
I reduced this to -2 and it returned to just 2 colours again- albeit different ones from
the original, with one being a garish purply-pink. I like to treat all colours equally, but between
red and blue it gets a bit too neon for my liking.
With the sawed-off origami I wanted to move it further into the red, to see how it affected
a collection of similar colours. I liked the result, but wanted to see what would happen
if I made it stronger still, so doubled it and again strayed into neon-pink land.
This SG553 behaved differently. Changing the pearlescent value did shift the colours around,
but then their shade remained fixed in place regardless of viewing angle. Where it catches
the light, it hints to a different colour, so I tripled the pearlescence but the same
thing happened. Don’t think I’m going to win any awards from these new colour schemes.
I had to feature something like this AWP Asiimov! The Pearlescent value only affects the orange
colour. A large value would transform it into a rainbow band but I resisted the temptation
and chose a modest value of ‘7’, which shifted it around to yellow-green. For some
reason I instinctively wanted to avoid yellow, but I quite like the effect here, with a light
green-blue around the edges acting as an almost metallic sheen to it. It looks smooth, doesn’t
it. I dropped this to a smaller -2 so it jumped the other way towards neon-pink. I’ve already
said how I don’t like this colour, but I think this design gets away with it better
than most. Something of a first here at the Klik Empire,
with the G3SG1 Flux pattern I got it right first time with a value of -9, thankfully
moving the dark purple away from neon-pink, but stopping just short of scat-yellow. It’s
at times like this I feel I shouldn’t be showing you this video and should instead
be developing similar skins of my own to cash in on this early testing!!!
I was wayyyy too demure with this galil. A value of 3 did hardly anything to the colours.
So I upped it to a STONKING massive value of 70! This turned the weapon into a multi-coloured
mess, with green highlights. It didn’t work in this case, but maybe hydrographic finishes
such as this one, and gunsmith finishes like the SG553 from earlier need a greater pearlescent
value than most to make a meaningful difference to the colours. Of course, this is something
you’ll quickly discover for yourself if testing your own designs. But I’ve got to
move on! Now for one that you know is going to be good-
the case-hardened AK47! It’s almost like the pearlescent feature was made for this
skin’s oily, rainbow finish. I chose a value of 24 to give the effect enough strength to
cycle through the colours several times at once. I like it.
But the more subtle uses deserve some love, too. Take the P250 Iron Clad. I tried to keep
it respectable by sticking to a reasonably low value of 5- just enough to give the edges
a purple tinge. I decided this was the right degree of pearlescence for this skin, so then
tried a similar but negative value to shift the whole design towards the purple end of
the spectrum. Almost looks like it’s been burnt in a fire now.
It’s not like the howl needs any changes, but I was curious to see what difference it
made to it. I didn’t want to risk going too far towards yellow in case some bits turned
green, so I set out to make it a darker red colour instead. BUT the phantom neon pink
struck and made it look like this instead. I can’t be bothered to manually edit the
values again, so let’s just shift the colours around in the video editor to get a feel for
how else it could have ended up. And last, at risk of making the name redundant,
let’s change the colour of the Scar 20 Emerald. A pearlescent value of 2 adds a hint of blue.
My favourite kind of blue. The best blue ever. When I grow up I want a car with this kind
of paint finish. If you don’t like it then I’ll fight you. The look is so good I upped
it to 5 to see what would happen and it ruined everything. There’s a warning for you, people-
don’t overdo it… or you’ll lose the things you love.