Bringing Corsair into Counter-Strike 2
A real headset, worn by characters in a game that was never asked to carry it. The design problem was not what it should look like — Corsair already knew that. It was getting a product built for marketing renders to survive inside a game engine and still read as the product.
The headset on a character model, logo legible at this distance.
Both colourways, and the reason it had to be cheap to render: everyone in the match is wearing one.
Two opposite kinds of 3D
Corsair supplied their own product model — the asset their marketing renders are made from. It arrived as a Cinema 4D scene of roughly 136 MB, with a studio lighting rig, photographic fabric and plastic materials, and a white background already set up.
That is exactly right for a product shot and exactly wrong for a game. A marketing model exists to be admired alone, held still, under lights chosen for it. A character asset has to sit on a moving body, read instantly at any distance, survive whatever lighting the map happens to have, and cost almost nothing to draw — because ten players are wearing it at once, sixty times a second.
Pulling the headset out of that scene on its own still left well over half a million faces. Everything after that was the real work: reducing it to something the game would carry without losing the shape, the proportions and the detail that make it recognisably a Corsair VOID rather than a generic headset.
That is the constraint the whole project turns on. A brand integration that nobody recognises is worthless, and one that tanks the frame rate gets removed.
Fitting it to a head that already exists
A headset is not a decal. It had to sit on heads modelled years ago by someone else, in a range of shapes, with hair and headgear already on them, and it had to sit right from every angle a camera could reach it from.
So the work happened on the character, not beside it. Grey first, with no texture to flatter the silhouette: if the shape was wrong, it was obvious there and nowhere else.
Fit checked on an untextured model, where only the shape can be judged.
The same fit on the finished character, sunglasses and beard included.
The asset on its own, once it carried the detail that makes the product recognisable at a weight the game could afford.
And in the game, at the distance most players will ever see it from — which is the distance that decides whether the silhouette reads as a product or as a lump.
The sky, from both sides
The headset is the close-range surface. The skybox is the opposite: it is what the brand looks like from everywhere at once. This one wraps the whole map in Corsair's yellow and magenta, so the colour is present in every frame a player captures without a single logo being in the way.
The skybox texture flat, before the engine wraps it around the map. Delivered at 8192 × 4096.
And wrapped around the map. Nobody reads a sky as advertising, which is exactly why it works.
Gloves and impacts
The gloves, at the size the player actually sees them.
Branded gloves in the player's own hands, and brand-coloured particles in place of the default impact effect.
The headset is what other players see. The gloves are what the player sees — constantly, because the game is first person. Between them the brand is present from both points of view, which is what makes it hold up in a clip regardless of whose screen it was recorded on.
All four surfaces running together in a live match.
Why this one transfers
Every brand with a physical product and a 3D file eventually wants that file somewhere it was not built for — a configurator, an AR try-on, a game. The asset is always wrong for the destination, and the decision about what to throw away is a design decision, not a technical one. Knowing which details carry the recognition is the job.
Dates. Which parts were yours versus Allstar's wider team. And credit for the co-branded promo video the stills above were taken from — if that was produced by Allstar's video team rather than you, it needs saying here.