Welcome to another episode where I try to improve, but end up messing up most of the
skins in CS:GO by adding a colour-shifting, pearlescent coating to stuff. As an example,
this fade revolver looks nice but I wanted it to become more purple-bluish. And I got
what I wanted, it’s just that it also came with an unhealthy dollop of neon-pink. My
only weakness! With great pearlescence comes great responsibility, so I reduced the strength
of the effect to 2 and shifted it the other way, leading to an only slightly less horrible
mustard yellow instead. I reckon if the original skin’s colours had been more subtle it would
have been okay. But then it wouldn’t have looked so good in the first place.
This Xiangliu is a lot more hopeful. It’s already in the purple spectrum so I don’t
need to worry about that any more. So let’s start with a nice large value of -8, which
retains the character of the weapon, but when flicked around shows flashes of blue and green.
I really liked this, so flipped the value which makes the colours cycle the other way
around the spectrum, shifting from purple through to orange, yellow and green. While
I say I like this skin, I also like how it looked originally so don’t take this video
as me demanding each skin goes RGB just for the sake of it.
I’ll make this one quick because it’s BORING. I started with a value of 3 for this
hydrographic finish and it did NOTHING to it, so upped it all the way to 100 which was
enough just to seemingly reduce the blue-colour’s saturation… but nothing more than that.
NEXT …and the same happened with this custom
paint job finished Arctic Wolf. Did you know that MP5’s get a raw deal in
CS:GO? There isn’t a single covert-grade skin, and just one of the second-best classified-grade,
which is this one. This being a gunsmith finish, a pearlescent value of 15 did more to it than
it did with the previous few, but didn’t suit the ‘appearance’ of this weapon.
I shouldn’t have done it. And then I upped the value to 100, making it display horrible
neon pink with alarming frequency. Let’s move on.
This AUG uses the same gunsmith finish as the MP5, but mimics an entirely different
material and the pearlescent effect reflects this. A value of just 2 was enough to shift
it into the purple- but thankfully not in a horrible way. Still, I wanted to see what
it did the other way and -3 made it a pleasant greenish blue. I’m happy I’ve finally
got the effect to look nice, after having butchered so many.
I don’t think the Mag7 Heat needs any colour shifting, but I was curious to see what it
would look like if I made it more reddish. BUT it skipped that and went straight for
neon pink. Let’s just move on. Back to butchering skins again now it seems.
The new FAMAS Commemoration is great. But wouldn’t making it more orangey also look
cool? …again it went straight to neon-pink. The bane of my life. I don’t think going
the other way into lime green would have been a lot better honestly.
Red doesn’t exist in pearlescent land, as when I tried to darken the Imperial Dragon’s
colours, it changed to purpley- pink instead. It pulls it off better than most.
The Desert Naga, being almost devoid of colours, means that it’s almost immune to a pearlescent
value… but not quite! I ramped it up to the maximum rating of 100 and it made it look
as though the whole weapon was a little bit oily. This can be most clearly seen- suitably-
on the handle. Those dirty little Counter-Terrorists should learn to wash their hands before matchmaking.
I like it, even if it’s no longer the intended ‘look’ of the weapon.
But my favourite is the Ruby Poison Dart. It’s shamelessly RGB but I don’t care.
It cycles through the colours in a mesmerising fashion as the angles change, too.
And the Atomic Alloy with the same anodized multicolour finish does the same thing, but
maybe less tastefully since the bits of colour are a lot bigger. Still, I’m sure there’s
a buyer for this out there somewhere. The Royal Consorts actually have ‘pearl
handled’ grips, making them ideal to test this effect on! And they’re certainly affected
by a pearlescent value. It’s a little bit unfortunate that the rest of the guns are
a tad golden as this is also affected by the effect, turning mint-green. Still, that’s
a small price to pay for RGB grips, even if the purple hues are a little overpowered.
I cycled the colours the other way and the handles again looked excellent, even if the
rest of the weapons turn a purple-blue. The M4A4 Royal Paladin, much like the Naga,
is just asking to be coated in oil. A value of 50 certainly did that and I think with
a few tweaks to its base colours and brightnesses could actually look rather decent. I also
found success with a more subtle value of 12, which bunches the colours less tightly,
resulting in a less confused, noisy appearance. And last is the Magma. Not sure what I was
thinking with this one, it’s never been a skin I’ve particularly liked and I only
managed to make it worse, betraying its name in the process. It’s been fun to mess about
with the effect, and you learn from making mistakes. So by now, I know a hellalllelot
about it.