First of all, it's common knowledge that Garry's Mod has a far different learning curve than other programs of its nature, posing of models and the inclusion of props all depend on you manually moving them with the source physics engine which, if you are sane, seems pretty silly.

To improve on Garry's Mod 13's flexibility when working with models, which in this instance is Team Fortress 2 characters, there are a number of add-ons in the steam workshop which are there to help make the process much easier. Some of the essentials that will be used in this guide are listed below.

The Bone Merger This is a tool used for customising default Team Fortress 2 models with the many cosmetic items found in the game today, by that, I mean HATS.

The Bodygroup Tool This is a wonderful little tool that allows you to bypass using code to change the skin of a model, for example, changing a RED Scout to a BLU one required you to write into the console manually, this tool however, cuts the effort needed drastically.

Paintable TF2 Items This is exactly what you think it is. With Garry's Mod 13 breaking most if not all addons to date, the creator of this addon changed most hats to a white colour, making them easier to colour with the 'color' tool!

The Standing Pose Another obvious help, this tool allows with two clicks of your mouse, to have any model in source to be put in a default 'standing' pose, now this can be an easy and effortless way to pose models, but it can be slightly unstable at times. You won't want to use this tool all of the time.

Finally, The Particle Attacher Another simple tool to allow 'unusual particle effects' from Team Fortress to be added to hat props in Garry's Mod, you won't use this tool all of the time either.

All of these add-ons can be installed into Garry's Mod 13 by clicking 'Subscribe' on the linked pages.

Once all of the tools have been installed, we can actually get into making the screenshot!

After the tedium of getting the wonderful tools that will make this process much easier, we can move on to actually bringing the screenshot together!

In the Garry's Mod 13 main menu, you can select to start a new single-player game where you can select which map you wish to play on, the list of maps will differ on what Source games you have installed (Portal, Half-life etc.) and will display only the maps it has data for.

For the intent of this guide, I will be using a Team Fortress 2 map and model.

The map is tr_target and the model is the RED Scout. the Scout being selected by holding 'q' on your keyboard, clicking on the 'spawnlists' tab of the menu and finding the characters page in the Team Fortress 2 drop-down menu, and then clicking on the classes picture to spawn it.





In the second screenshot, you will see that I pick the 'hardware morphs' instead of the default set of classes, this is done because the hardware morph classes are seen to be more flexible and more easily posed, it's good practice to use these models instead.

Now, using the physics gun, you can drag each of the models appendages and areas around separately, obviously freezing them in the air if you wish. But you will see that for some appendages like the head and arms will cause the model to fall to the ground as you are holding it. to accommodate for this, you should always start to pose a model by grabbing their upper-chest as it is the easiest to work with.



Once you have that down, you can slowly move the model down so that their feet are comfortably touching the ground with room to bend the knees, this is to make the pose look a lot more natural, and using this technique will stop making it seem like the model is stretching their legs into a strange and unnatural action. an example of it being put into action is here:



The rest of the model can be posed relatively easily if you make sure that the entire torso is frozen in a position that seems natural to you, as all that is left is to move the legs to a natural position (see above picture) and the arms, Oh the arms...

A good rule of thumb before you go posing the arms without any kind of regard is to understand that they are not of the same flexibility. The arms in Team Fortress 2 models in particular do not need to have the same flexibility as the right hand has to work with the most complex animations (For example the spy must be animated Stabbing, shooting and cloaking) while the left arm will be used for small things like the Scout supporting a pistol with both hands or the Spy holding the sapper.

Using this to your advantage, if you want a complex pose with the models arms, make sure the right arm is doing the complex stuff, and the left being mostly out of the focus. Going back to our Scout, we can see that posing the arm is simply take the upper arm, freezing it, taking the lower arm and freezing that, then posing the angle of the hand. Easy stuff!



Once you're happy with the basic pose of your model, you can move onto making the model work with props, and then customising it using the add-ons we installed earlier.

The basic shape of your model is complete! Well done! Now to move on to what exactly you want your character to hold, wear, look at, or punch the teeth out of!

Now, I have posed the RED Scout to be holding thin air, but of course, we want to fill that air with something more weapony, weapons!

I'm going to have the Scout look over a pistol with a slightly confused look on him, with that, I'm also going to give him The Essential Accessories, an Unusual Tusslecap with steaming effect, and the Fast Learner... in pink. Going from this description, we'll check off each part of the customisation as we go along.



First of all we're going to look for Team Fortress 2 weapon models, each games props and weapons will be in a different location so you'll have to look around the spawnlists for the right place.

For Team Fortress 2, all weapons that are not the default models are kept in Games/tf/weapons/c_models

Default weapon models are in the weapons menu where you found the Scout model to begin with.
once you find it, look for the prop you want the model to have in their hands or to interact with. I'm going to choose a pocket pistol for the Scout.



Once you find the weapon, great! Now we can get the model to interact with it, but no matter how we try, we can't shove the pistol into the Scouts tiny hands



So what you need to do now is start working with your Tool-gun, your other best friend.
Going to the tools area of the 'q' menu we've been in to find the model and weapon, we can see a bunch of stuff we can do with the world, like give the Scout 1500 thrusters or turn him into a stained-glass portrait of Gordon Freeman, what you're looking for today however is the No-Collide Tool.

Once you find it, simply take your tool gun out and Right-click both the prop chosen and the model itself, if done correctly you'll see that you can now position the prop inside the model without any resistance, now letting you mould their hands around it!



Now, going back to the tools area and finding the finger poser, we can right click the scouts hands with the tool gun and hold 'c' in order to have a menu that we can fiddle with his hands to work with the pistol, you can see for yourself how to work the poser, and you can judge when the pose is natural enough, here's the end result.



And with that done, the final stage before the customisation is the face posing, Which can get challenging to get the exact right expression.

For Team Fortress 2, and especially hardware models, when you select the face poser and right click their faces you will instantly want to turn down the flex scale to 0.60 or less, because... well...



If however you mess with the sliders enough, you'll end up with your target emotion, and yes it gets easier the more you do it, here's the scouts face posing finished.



(This also included eye posing which is very easy to do, select the eye poser and stand where you want the model to look, right click the model, and their eyes will shift to that position, simply no-clip into the prop to make them look at it)

After that, it's all down to customization, and then final post processing!

The second last hurdle to get by is the customisation of the model, and with the help of the addons from the start, is much easier than before they existed.

Now in the previous section I mentioned I wanted the Scout to wear a hat and 2 misc items from the game, one of them being painted and the hat was to have a particle effect.

First, go to the Games/tf/player/items directory in the spawnlists section of the 'q' menu, assuming you're in the right place, you'll see folders named after all of the classes in Team Fortress 2, since we're looking for Scout items, we'll look in the scout folder for the Fast Learner, Essential Accessories and Troublemakers Tosslecap, and yes, this does require some trial and error while you look for specific items.

After around 5 minutes of looking, you can see the items needed all here.



But as you can see, none of these items are red, and no matter how you may try, the Fast Learner and Essential Accessories won't change colour if If you paint them! (The tosslecap however can easily be coloured any colour you want through the colour tool) Here's when it gets a little difficult.

In order to paint miscs in TF2 (Or any TF2 item that is spawned as an effect with a little green circle around it), we need to open the console, you can google how to do this in Garry's Mod and it's very easy, once you're done you can press the button usually below your escape button to open it up.

Step 1: Go to the misc in the menus of the 'q' menu we found the hat in and find out the name of it by hovering over it. (for example, the fast learner is called Scout_prep_shirt)
Step 2: Open the console and type:
prop_dynamic_create player/items/Classnamehere/NameOfItemHere.mdl
Step 3: replace the blanks with the suitable class name and item name, then hit enter, if you did it correctly, you'll have a colourable misc item that does not have a green ring around it somewhere, If you make a mistake, Like I did the first time, you will get a big error sign which is an indication that you probably spelt it wrong. (The error can't be deleted so don't write the code next to your model)

Here's the new miscs with their colour ready to be equipped.



Now, using the particle attacher add-on we installed earlier, we can add the steaming effect through selecting it in the menu for the tool, then simply clicking the hat, done.



After that, we're ready to use the Bodygroup Changer add-on to left click the Scout, and then hold 'c' like we did to pose his fingers and then select for him to not have his hat, his headset, or his shoes, so that they can be replaced by the hat and miscs.



After that, we can use the Bone Merger tool we also downloaded earlier in order to stick the items onto the Scout, it's very easy to do.

Simply get the Bone merger out, and LEFT click the Scout (He will be red, or one solid colour). Then, LEFT click all the items you had prepared earlier until they are green, after that, RIGHT click anywhere and the items will magically attach to the Scout.
Soon, we have our finished Scout, posed, propped, prepped and ready for post-production!

There's not much to say about this section, the way you want to use post-processing in every situation will differ, but this part of the guide will show you exactly what filters I use to make the screenshot look better before it's taken.

First of all, navigate away from the spawnlists tab and go to Post-processing, here you will see a number of dropdown menus you can use to change your view of the level and more importantly, your final shot.

I use 3 filters mainly (4 as of recent), it is rare that I will use all of them at the same time in a shot however, and each one has their own situations to be used in, you have:

In the effects menu, you have Depth of Field, a very powerful filter that can help in nearly any screenshot by letting the focus stay on where you have placed the most effort, DoF can help in any situation that merits it. If Depth of Field is selected, it can be edited by holding down 'c' where you can change where the depth of field starts in the shot, and how strong it is. Here's the Scout with Depth of Field on.


Toy Town is another filter found in the Shaders menu and helps for close-ups and for combining with Depth of Field. Toy Town creates an out of focus area around the borders of the screen, and this helps give the shot a frame without it being too garish, it's good when you can use it, but don't think it can be used in every shot.


Bloom is found in the Shaders menu and can be modified in the 'c' menu like Depth of Field to fit a wide array of shots. The colours or brighter lights in the shot will be exaggerated further and when used correctly can be very nice to look at, but too much and the picture will degrade in quality. Use it sparingly.


Lastly, you have Super Depth of Field, working in the same way Depth of field does only better. The SuperDOF is a slightly more advanced filter that allows you to focus on a single point in the shot and render it to look extremely nice, I haven't found enough places to put this in, but when I do I'm very happy with its outcome, it also helps with unsightly jaggy textures in your shot (Thanks Wombat Ninja!). Use this filter when you can.


And then, once you feel comfortable with that, you're done! you can take the picture and fine-tune it however you like, if you actually read all of this I commend you, and I thank you for reading.

Edit: there is a number of other filters on the Workshop that can be really fun to play around with, one reccommended to me was the Basic Vignette filter which I love
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=134437650


Oh and as an added, note, I love seeing peoples attempts after reading the guide, I'd love to see some, so send me some of your work!