Weapon Darkswarm - BitFire

Gun for Darkswarm – Commission for BitFire

This asset was a commission from BitFire, a Danish studio and creators of the game Darkswarm. The task was to design a futuristic weapon based on a concept provided by the team. The design featured two removable square batteries and a detachable rail with a scope.

The textures needed to be prepared for color customization in Unreal Engine, allowing each player to personalize the weapon’s appearance. To achieve this, I created masks in Substance Painter, using the RGB channels to define customizable areas, and the Alpha channel to isolate metal surfaces for color adjustments—maximizing flexibility.

The model had to stay close to a 30k polygon limit. I created both the high poly and low poly versions in Maya, and performed baking in Substance Painter.

One of the main challenges was learning BitFire’s specific masking workflow for material customization. It was a great learning experience, and the final result worked exactly as requested by the studio.

You can see in the videos how the weapon colors can be adjusted in real time inside Unreal Engine.

Software used: Maya, Substance Painter, Unreal Engine.