Unusual Effect: Gilded and Blessed Snowflakes

Had the pleasure of working with Spektral and Phe on another Unusual Effect, submitted for consideration for the 2026 Winter Holiday Update for Team Fortress 2. Vote for the effect here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3837056130

I played a smaller role in this one, supplying and upgrading a sprite originally shipped with Frozen Fractals for the Winter 2020 Holiday update for this new effect, and providing feedback to Spektral who did the rest. Nice chance to take something I made over 10 years ago and redesign parts of it with the skills I've learned over the past 10 years.

Sprite was made with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Substance Designer. Originally 128px by 128px, I took the source vector art and exported at 1024x, then used photoshop to add additional detailing and clean it up a bit after rasterizing it. After that it was off to Designer to composite it with the needed tweaks and changes for the effect.

Spektral: https://steamcommunity.com/id/mvmupdatewhen
Phe: https://steamcommunity.com/id/freeTVsssss