The Prisma case has 17 community-made skins. I spoke with their makers. Jump to the weapon
you want to learn about in this video’s description.
P90 Off World by Helenek, Puffin and Medic! was inspired by an old interview with Valve,
when they were still figuring out how skins in CS:GO were going to work. At this early
point, they theorized that battle scarred skins might become the most valuable. But
now we all know that didn’t happen. The Off World attempts to add value to the battlescarred
category by having it reveal designs that aren’t visible in the less worn categories.
I show the factory new class in these videos, but I’m going to make an exception for this
one by comparing it with the battlescarred version. Look at all that extra detail. Apparently,
the glock of this design became a community favourite and was included in the Spectrum
2 case, making this P90 the second of the series to be officially included. Its maker,
Puffin, finds it amusing that the factory new glock remains the most valuable category
for the weapon, but he says that for a short while, people did value the battlescarred
variant more highly, especially with a skull on the side.
Famas Crypsis by MGBazz was originally called Ghost Insects and he intended for it to be
a very creative pattern. For it can be seen as 2 different designs: the first being of
camouflage with branches and leaves. The second is of insects. All insects! And no leaves
or branches. These bugs are called the Phasmatodea, and are actually a real thing! ‘Phasma’
means apparition or phantom in ancient Greek, and as you can see from the pattern here,
the apparent leaves are one insect type, and the ‘sticks’, another.
The MP7 Mischief by Estavos was painted as roughly as possible, and was originally codenamed
‘racketeer’. He makes similar skins for Rust, but in a more dark and aggressive style-
he has had many skins accepted for that game, several following a similar colour-scheme
to this MP7. The theme for this one was ‘madness’, following a ‘spitfire jaw’ design. He
says it was created to be the way it is, with no intended easter-eggs or extras. Just a
simple, bold design that you could imagine being painted on this kind of weapon. He created
another, chained version. It never made it to the workshop, but here is the skin when
compared with the Mischief so you can see how they’re different from one another.
P250 Verdigris by SLIMEface was basically just him playing around in 3D coat, with some
of the new ‘smart materials’. He wanted to make something that changed colour with
the patina finish. He has made all of his skins using this program but didn’t expect
this one to be accepted as it’s just a ‘flat’ material skin, though he’s obviously happy
it was included. The pattern itself is fixed, and as the wear level increases the brown
colouring fades, but the green streaks always remain visible.
Galil Akoben by Marduk is part of an existing series- and directly translates to ‘War
Horn’. The first of its design was for the MP7, featured in the Spectrum case. Although
that one uses a different colour-scheme. He spent a lot of time improving the design for
this galil, trying to make the brush strokes appear as though were done with wet paint,
and he feels there’s more texture and nuance in the details of this one. This is all obvious
to him, having made it, though he wonders if others will notice or appreciate the changes
as well. His aim practice project has come on a long way since we last spoke and he hopes
to have it released sometime this week- link in the video’s description.
Mac10 Whitefish by Mia was made under the codename, Live Bait. Using the gunsmith finish,
the white paint never fades, but the rest of the gun loses its lustre.
AK47 Uncharted by Apel and DenstarskB was intended to be part of a tattoo collection
based on the ‘polynesian style’. Having previously made a ‘tattoo stickers capsule’,
he intended to make a series of weapons and stickers based on the same lore. But the concept
of the design was initially a failure! It didn’t play nicely with the AK47’s shape,
so he took a break from working on it until he got inspiration, one day. He redesigned
it to be a simpler patterned design. He started with the central area, painted with a silhouette
of a Polynesian tribal face, with the nose ending on the grip. He also focused on the
hand grip and handle, giving them a wooden texture, carved with ethnic patterns. The
face on the handle was inspired by a game from his childhood called ‘Zuma’. You
can spot an eye with a tear which he thought was a nice addition to the composition. Here
is his Glock Oni skin, which was initially the style he was going for with the AK.
The Tec9 Bamboozle by Graff is the first of 2 skins he has had featured in this collection.
He thought that bamboo was a cool idea for a cylindrical weapon such as the tec9. At
an early stage he also had a banana design, but prioritised bamboo since he considered
it a more realistic material choice for a weapon. But he kept the fruit sticker on the
design to make it look as though it had been imported from some Southern country. This
deliberately looks like the St Marc logo, since he found the skin fitting for that map.
He used substance creator to develop this skin as it worked well with his previous ‘frostbite’
series of skins. He added scratches and chips to make it look like bamboo, and then applied
a normal map to give it a 3D appearance. And he finished it off by baking some lighting
into the texture. Graff really enjoyed working on this design.
The UMP45 Moonrise by MGBazz and his old friend from school, Mals1, is the second of his hotline-miami
inspired skin collection, the first being a glock featured in the clutch collection.
It uses an anodized airbrushed finish and can shift horizontally with each skin of the
design, making each unique, but still resembling a complete pixel-art skyline. A faint scanline
appearance is shown to give the impression that it’s from a TV screen. And once again,
there’s a star that has a small chance of being shown just next to the sight on the
weapon. But at 8%, it’s more common than on the glock which he calculated at being
on under 4% of the designs.
MP5 Gauss by Millenia was a very interesting project for him: the weapon had only just
been added to CS:GO and he was learning a new CAD program called Fusion 360, so he decided
to combine the two to explore new workflows. He spent the first 10 days recreating the
MP5 model in the program so that he could develop designs without being limited by a
low-poly model. He thinks this paid off as he was able to add complex details onto the
surface with little hassle. Poly modelling is imprecise, and although CAD modelling takes
more time, very few other approaches deliver such a ‘rich’ quality to the shapes and
textures- it means that less hand-painting is required to reach an optimal result. Another
example he showed me was this M249 model, saying the final appearance is different from
his earlier works. He will be applying the same process to his future designs and hopes
to continue pushing the limits of mechanically-themed skins!
Deagle Light Rail by De Puiseau is part of his Exoskeleton collection… which you might
know for its excellent Mac10 Pipe Down design which looked like a series of 3D pipes. He’s
at it again with this one, drawing on a series of grooves and sticky out bits that aren’t
part of the original deagle design. Of course it’s done so well that you might forget
what the original deagle looks like, so I’ll show the default skin so that you can compare
the two. The idea was to do something cool with the moving parts inside the deagle, similar
to the USP design he had worked on previously. The deagle’s skin is a mirrored design,
so he accepted it had to be symmetrical. To start with, he took screenshots of the deagle
in-game and drew over them where he wanted the 3D elements to be. He then modelled this
3D version in a third-party program. The collection is now 11 skins large, 9 of which sport the
original black and red design, but with this deagle and M4 being the two that aren’t.
AWP Atheris by Graff is his second skin in this collection. He loves the look of the
bush viper and spent about a month crafting this design. He wanted it to be extremely
detailed and to give the feeling that the snake is actually wrapped around the weapon.
Since drawing each scale would have taken an enormous amount of time, he instead made
use of his 3D skills and modelled it in Zbrush. He then rendered the lighting, then overprinted
it in photoshop to give it a more painted look. He then brought it into 3D coat to paint
it directly onto the weapon and to line it up for the first person view. He’s very
happy with the result, and even more so that Valve appreciates his work! Here are some
of the early 3D renders, which Graff kindly provided for this video.
R8 Skull Crusher by Ego Death is an older skin of his from the workshop, released the
first week the revolver was in the game! It was originally named ‘the Oppressor’ and
was meant to loosely fit the theme set by his loudmouth and chatterbox skins; those
were bright yellow and white, with intentionally rough application. But at the time a lot of
skins on the workshop were following a sci-fi style, so he decided to make it stand out
a bit more by making it wild and hand-painted. He always hoped this one would make it into
the game as it’s his personal favourite. The only part he had trouble with was in fitting
the skull onto the rear section and hammer without making it look odd, but even with
that it was a surprisingly fast project that quickly reached a point where he was happy
with it. All with minimal sketching and iteration.
AUG Momentum by MultiH and dC is the second of the series to get accepted, the first being
the UMP which was featured in the Danger Zone case. The development of this weapon came
about when CSGO Dev’s twitter account encouraged people to vote for AUG skins. They chose the
Momentum style because they felt it translated well with this weapon’s thicc stock. Originally
the scope had been textured, but then they realised this was a separate, unskinnable
model. When MultiH received the email saying that it had been accepted, he frantically
discord-messaged dC to wake him up! He says that there are worse things to wake up to.
They definitely plan on making more Momentum skins. Their Neon M4 Momentum is doing well
on the workshop right now.
But they are also experimenting with different colour schemes to avoid monotony- even considering
an experimental holo finish to give this design some diversity! They would like to thank Valve
for even considering their skin, and everybody along the way who has supported them. Even
leaving something as simple as an upvote means a lot.
XM1014 Incinegator by Ego Death is his second accepted skin in this case. It’s more recent
than his revolver entry. Between that and this one, he went through a period of developing
more subtle, ‘constructed’ designs, taking a break from his hand-drawn collections. The
M4A4 Magnesium featured in the Danger Zone collection was one of these. But he then decided
to do something a little more fun again, so created this one to brush up on his artwork
skills a bit. It was almost completely made on one layer and he’d just redraw anything
he didn’t like until he did. He said it was great fun to work on. He originally named
it incinerator, with some sort of generic monster type creature, but as per usual he
prefers Valve’s chosen name. While he didn’t plan to make it into a collection, he’s
now developing this PP Bizon skin.
The Five-Seven Angry Mob by SHPR is his first skin remake from the Street Art Collection-
which was a series of skins based around colourful cartoony creatures, graffiti’d on a wall.
This design sports the custom paintjob finish and it scratches off as it goes through the
wear levels. The original five-seven was more yellow, and didn’t have the blue section
you can see here. I’ll show a comparison here so you can see the differences between
the original and this remake more clearly. In total, this is the third skin from the
street art collection to be added to the game, the other two being the hellfire… and the
devourer. (Show Street Art collection logo)
And last is the M4A4 Emperor by Onilolz, Zaphk and 2minds. It’s part of their Tarot collection,
intended to be the CT equivalent of the terrorist’s AK47 ‘Empress’ skin- which has already
been included. Each entry into the Tarot series is inspired from a different major Arcanum
card. So far they’ve completed skins for 9 of the 22. The idea is to make sure each
weapon has a connection with the card it’s matched with, that plays into its personality.
As well as the Emperor and Empress, the Mortis has also been featured in a case, making this
M4A4 the 3rd of the series to be accepted.