This guide is only about posing, since that is the first step into making good screenshots, and in most cases visual improvements are not really necessary. I will not be talking about lamps, color modification, bloom or any other visual elements.

English is not my first languages, so I will definitely guarantee, that this guide is not 100% grammatically correct.

Please consider joining my gmod group too. It is a place for gmodders or people who like to watch gmod screenshots. In case you are a gmodder, you can post your screenshots in the group, so other memebers can see them too. Just go to the discussion-section and find the thread called "Share Your Stuff" and post your pictures in the comment section.

In this guide I have focused a lot on making it short, but also very detailed, so it will be easy to read the entire guide. Most of the guide is a bunch of pictures with little text that explains, what is going on. The guide is a kinda "step-to-step" tutorial, so it is easy to learn everything, but also that you can skip those parts, that you already know. Before we get started, you are about to see what good posing looks like, compared to bad posing.

--------finger-posed HWM scout model --------------vs---------------Normal scout model-------------------

I will explain later, how some of these tool works, so you will understand, why I recommend them.

Primary Tools
In every single screenshot that I make, I use these tools as a minimum.

• Camera (the first weapon in the 6th. weapon slot)
  
• Camera tool
  
• Ragdoll Mover
  
• Standing pose tool

Secondary Tools
These tools are more situational, but very useful.

• No Collide Everything
  
• Advanced Bone Tool
  
• Resizer Tool
  
• Color - TF2 paint
  
• Ragdoll Resizer

(1st.) You are allowed to do anything, no matter how physically incorrect it is, just as long it looks good from the camera's perspective

(2nd.) Another trick is, making ragdolls looking towards each other, without standing "face to face."

(3rd.) If you are making a profile picture, you can leave everything un-posed, except the head. There is no reason to pose the rest of the ragdoll, if nobody is going to see it anyway.

First of all, you want to find a position to place your camera. Equiping the camera weapon will remove your hud, so it won't be in the screenshot.

Then you hold right mouse button down and move the mouse forward to zoom.

Now we have found the background for our picture, we will place a camera with the camera tool. This allow us to move around in the map without losing this camera position.

It is now time to grab the Standing Pose Tool. With this tool you can easily move your ragdolls, place them wherever you want and leaves the ragdolls in a "T-pose". The standing Pose Tool is very useful, because every single ragdoll bone is now "frozen", makes it very easy to use the Radgoll Mover Tool

Before we get started on this chapter, it's very important that Ragdoll Mover tool's update rate is set to the lowest as possible, by default I think it is set to 1, which means it will take 1 second for the ragdoll to move into a new position and feels very laggy.

This is the part, Where we start posing the ragdoll. When holding the tool and looking at your ragdoll, you will see the names on the Ragdoll's bones. In this case I am looking at "bip_lowerArm_L". This tool is much better than Physgun, because this tool allows us to move 1 bone at the time.

Left click on a bone will show you 3 arrows. These arrows are only used for moving the ragdoll and are often used, if you want to place a ragdoll in mid-air. These arrows will only work, if you are targeting the main bone in the ragdoll. In this case tf2 ragdolls' main bone is called "bip_pelvis"


Left click on a bone will show you 3 arrows, but then click with mouse wheel and it will show you 3 circles. when you look at one of the circles, it will turn yellow. left click on the circle and you are able to move the lower arm.

Now that you know, how to use your tools, it is time to start posing. In this case we will make something simple. I will make "Heavy eating a candy cane." Let us say, that we are not sure, how we are going to make this look good/natural. In this situation I would go look it up on the internet. After you have found a picture, you can see what ragdoll bones you need to move and try to recreate the pose on the picture. I did not find any pictures on the internet, so I borrowed a picture from a friend of mine, "Gandorf."
If this is the first time you are using Ragdoll Mover, it may be a pain in the butt. It does require some practice and getting used to. Here is my result, trying to recreate heavy's sandwich eating animation.

This is what I did.

• Raised chest, right upper-arm and left shoulder.
  
• Right shoulder turned a little bit backwards.
  
• Turned the left upper-arm forward.
  
• Left lower-arm pointing towards his hip.
  
• Right lower-arm set at an angle of 90 degrees compared to upper-arm

Now it is time to add the candy cane. In this situation it is easist to move it with the physgun instead of using the Ragdoll Mover tool. I will place the candy cane, so it fits to his head and not his hands.

Now the candy cane is in the right spot, I will just move heavy's arm slightly, so it looks correct.

In this picture I want heavy to hold the candy cane, so what I usual do is changing the finger pose to "thumbs up."
Now we are close to what we are looking for. But still need some manual work, because the fingers are a little bit messed up after we used "thumbs up." We want the fingers to stand next to each other like on the picture shown to the right.
----------Thumbs up without any changes------------------------------Thumbs up with changes------------

All we need to do now is just moving the thumb. The pictures below will show you what direction you need to move the thumb. The thumb bone closest to the hand is left unchanged, which means I have only moved 2 of the thumb's bones.
--------------Middle thumb bone moved-----------------------------Thumb's finger tip bone moved---------

There we go, now we got a hand/fist ready to carry our candy cane

This is a very useful technic and I use it very often. You can also use it on other models, but be aware of that models behave differently on the specific finger pose. Some models might need small adjustments, while other models get a completely different hand pose.

Face posing can be very difficult, because the sliders can be completely different from one model to another. Therefore it is important to be experienced with the model that you are working with. In this case we got the HWM Heavy. These TF2 models are great for making your own face or impression. The original TF2 on the other hand is very easy to face pose, because you can literally move just 1 silder, and then you got a "happy heavy." The picture below is the original tf2 model, where only 1 slider has been changed.


HWM models got silders, that are very similar to a real life face's muscles. Before posing our heavy will do a short analysis. Imagine that you are about to eat the candy cane. Here comes the funny part, I recommend you to actually try make a suitable impression with your "real life face." This helps me a lot, because now I can literally feel, what parts of the face I need to change on heavy.

• Open mouth
  
• Raised cheeks
  
• Raised eyebrows
  
• Slightly more open eyes

This is very simple. Move to direction you want heavy to look at and then right click on heavy like this. By right clicking at heavy it will make his eyes look at you.

The result has a great effect on how natural it looks.
-------------------------default---------------------------------------------------------eye-posed---------------------

Here is the final version of the picture. I already from the beginning I wanted scout to be in it, so I left a bit of space for him.



Now that you know all this information about posing, it is time for you to practice. You won't become a good gmodder just by reading a guide, but in fact you will learn much faster. Good posing has a lot to do with body language which express someone's attitude and behavior and therefore it is very important that you understand it too. This makes quite good sense, because if you are making a picture with bad poses, it will be harder for other people to recognize, what is going on, which leaves these people confused and unable to understand the picture.

A feminine pose obviously indicates that the person is a female and usually used for attraction


Pointing finger can be used in many situations like blaming, "going this way", "look over here" or in general to indicate where should be focused

Facepalm is very common and means disappointment and shame. Valve has used it for Spy's animation, when their team lose.


Raised fists are often a sign of prepared to fight.