Alright, so, lets get some things straightened out before you start reading.

1. I am no professional and there are plenty of people who are much more knowledgable than me about creating Garry's Mod artwork. This guide is simply intended to show you my way of making Garry's Mod posters which may or may not be helpful to you depending on your experience.

2. This is my first guide, I am no good writer by any means so I apologize in advance for any grammatical mistakes or awkward phrasing that you may come across.

3. There are quite a lot of pictures in this guide, just a forewarning.

I think that's about everything i needed to say for this section, you may scroll down now.

Addons can make the process of creating Garry's Mod artwork flow much smoother. They also can provide you with tools that expand the possibilities of what you will be capable of making.

NONE OF THESE ADDONS ARE MINE!

Easy Bonemerge Tool - Made by Rubat
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=170917418

Cloak Effect Tool - Made by NO LOAFING!
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=608061297

Ragdoll Resizer - Made by NO LOAFING!
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=470366741

Soft Lens Flare - Made by Shell
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=142146606

Team Fortress Letters - Made by Colum and MooTheMoo
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=543313414

Easy Bodygroup Tool - Made by Rubat
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=104604943

Spooky Eyes [MODEL] - Made by Coverop
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=110099044

Toggle Shadow Tool - Made by D-Nine
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=157560152

TF2 HWM SFM Models - Made by SarisKhan
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=524925872

TF2 Particle Fixer Script - Made by 1337gamer15
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=115544377

Basic Vignette - Made by VideahGams
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=134437650

Advanced Particle Controller - Made by NO LOAFING!
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=242776816

Tf2 Better Phys V2 (reuploaded) - Made by Daddy
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=202241938

Enhanced Pyro - Made by Maxxy and Velly
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=183440286

Ragdoll Mover - Made by Winded
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=104575630

Hat Painter and Crit Glow Tools - Made by NO LOAFING!
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=135491961

Standing Pose Tool - Made by Winded
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=104576786

Cosmetic Face Poser Fix - Made by NO LOAFING!
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=282164100

Advanced Bone Tool - Made by Thirteen
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=279079869

Particle Attacher - Made by Dewdos
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=105447250

Easy Animation Tool - Made by Rubat
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=104604709

HWM Face Poser Fix - Made by NO LOAFING!
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=227947662

Prop Lock - Made by Matt
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=117904674

It is not necessary for you to download each of these addons, but I do find that each of these can be useful in their own way. Consider this a list of addons which I recommend, but do not consider mandatory for creating Garry's Mod artwork. That being said, certain addons such as the Easy Bonemerge Tool and Easy Animation Tool will be used in the example shown later in this guide.

These are a few console commands that should improve the visual fidelity of the images you create in Garry's Mod.

Feel free to tweak these commands to your liking.

r_projectedtexture_filter 0.2
r_flashlightdepthres 2048
mat_depthbias_shadowmap 0.0000005
mat_slopescaledepthbias_shadowmap 2

*NOTE*
Do not insert these commands into the console while loaded into a map as doing so will most likely crash Garry's Mod.

Now that we've gone over all of the technical stuff we can begin making a poster. The first step is to choose a map to work with.

For this example, I have chosen cp_gullywash_final1 for the map and I will be using this area of the map to construct the image.

I prefer to use TF2 maps since most of my Garry's Mod artwork is centered around TF2 characters, but you can of course deviate from this and create your own artwork using characters and maps from other games.

Now that we have chosen the setting for our poster, we will need to spawn in our character and set up a camera to photograph them. I will also show you how to access the TF2 cosmetics in Garry's Mod so we can customize our character to our liking.

First of all, we need to place down a camera. This camera will be helpful for us because it allows us to always know where the exact perspective of our poster is.















Okay, now we spawn in our ragdoll and stand him up using the Standing Pose Tool. For this example I've chosen a ragdoll of the soldier.
















Now, In Garry's Mod you have a few different options on how to pose your character. The Physgun and Ragdoll Mover are both useful tools for creating customized poses, but explaining how to use either of these tools in a guide will likely be very time consuming. For simplicities sake, we can use the Easy Animation Tool to take a pose that already exists in TF2's files and use that for our poster.

To use the Easy Animation Tool simply hold down the "C" button on your keyboard and right click on the soldier. If you downloaded the Easy Animation Tool then you will see a button with a green checkmark that says "Make Animatable." Click on that.













Before we go ahead with choosing our animation, I want to explain how we can add cosmetics to our character here. An interesting quirk of Garry's Mod is that it does not list TF2 cosmetics by their display name in TF2.

A helpful guide to use when searching for TF2 cosmetics in Garry's Mod is the guide I have listed below. This will show you the names of TF2 cosmetics as they are listed in Garry's Mod.
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=122763613
I'm aware that the guide is for Source Filmaker but SFM and Garry's Mod have the same filenames so it will still apply here.

The cosmetics I will be using are the War Pig and the Antarctic Parka which you can find in Garry's Mod by searching "soldier_" and selecting from the search list.













We can bonemerge these cosmetics to the soldier by using the Easy Bonemerge tool.
Just right click on the ragdoll and then left click the cosmetics (the green circle) and you'll be done! (And of course you'll want to remove his default hat from clipping into the War Pig.)











Now that we have that done, back to the posing. Right click the soldier with the Easy Animation Tool and you should see a list of Animations that you can play when you hold down "C"
















I have chosen this animation which I have freezed by pressing "R" on the soldier and I've also gone back and bonemerged a rocket launcher to his hand.

Alright! We are done here! On to the next step.

Okay, now we need to get our soldier into the shot of the camera.

This step is pretty easy, just take out your Physgun and move the soldier into the camera's perspective that we placed down earlier.












It looks alright, but something is still off.
If you notice, the scenery behind him is lit up in sunlight, but he himself is still quite dark.
We will need something to fix this...


Thats right, we'll need some lighting to brighten him up.
We can use the Lamp tool in the Construction tab to achieve this.
The RGB of the lamps can be tweaked to preference.

I personally like this setting here.
Red: 177
Green: 220
Blue: 255

I also use the Soft category for my lamps and i have my Brightness set to somewhere around 1.30 but feel free to experiment with what you think looks good.

So now that you got all that down, lets place down our lamps.
I decided to have mine set up like this. (Once again, feel free to experiment here.)





















Now I'm going to use a pinkish/reddish type of colored lamp to brighten him up a bit and a blueish lamp to provide a bit of contrast to his red attire.






















Now our shot looks like this!

You can see that the lamps have brightened up our soldier quite a bit, this makes him looks much more consistent with the bright background of the image.

That is all for the lamps so now lets move on to Post Processing!

Post processing can help enhance your poster in different ways, such as sharpening the image, saturating certain colors, adding visual effects, and so on. If used correctly, post processing can make an image feel much more dynamic and interesting.

So, here are some of the categories of effects you will find in the Garry's Mod post processing tab.

Effects - Which includes Depth of Field, Accumulation Motion Blur, Stereoscopy, Super DoF, and Frame Blend.

Overlay - Which includes a ♥♥♥♥ ton of overlays... (these are not extremely useful imo)

Shaders - Which includes Sobel, Sharpen, Sun Rays, Color Modification, Toy Town, and Bloom.

and finally,

Texturize - Don't use any of these.




So now that you know of all the Post Processing features lets actually use some of them.

Lets start off with Sharpen
What Sharpen does is self explanatory, it sharpens everything on the screen.
You really don't have to play around with the settings on this one just make sure the Contrast isn't too high and you'll be good to go!

Next we've got Color Modification
Color Modification is a very nice feature in Garry's Mod.
As it says ingame, Color Modification lets you "modify the colors on the screen" which can be used to great effect.

Color Modification has a Brightness, Contrast, and Color multiplier setting which you can change to your liking. My personal settings that I've chosen for this example are shown below.


























Got it? Good!





Now theres Bloom which makes the poster look... well... bloomy
I've seen a lot of people who say this feature isn't very good but I think it can be useful when used subtlely.
Bloom has more settings than any other post processing effect i've shown so far, it would be laborious for me to explain each one individually so here are my personal settings that I've chosen.



























And now that our post processing is complete, this is our resulting image!













Looks nice so far!





We can also add a Vignette which will be taken from the Basic Vignette addon listed in the Addon section of this guide. This addon has no adjustable settings so all you have to do is select it!



And finally, we have Super DoF.
Super DoF allows you to focus on a certain layer of the image while blurring everything else out. This will be useful for us, as we can use it to highlight our character, the soldier, while removing some visual clutter imposed by the scenery around him.
Left click the ragdoll and Super DoF will focus on it.
And then click Render and you're done!


And here is the finished poster!

Here are some examples of Garry's Mod artwork that I've made in the past. All of these images use techniques that I've shown in this guide and hopefully showcase the capability of GMod as a tool for 3D artwork. :D

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=581737920

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=598899588

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=601265212

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=612522550

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=527613395

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=648400690

Like I said in the beginning, this is my first guide so please let me know what you thought!

You can find all of my Garry's Mod artwork and posters here at this link. http://steamproxy.net/id/BrettyGood/screenshots/?appid=4000

I hope this was a good introduction into the world of Garry's Mod posters, if you are willing to put in the time, you can really make outstanding artwork using this game.

Thanks for reading!