Dam(n)

Without DoF:

With DoF:

I couldn't decide which one was the best version of this picture, so I put both of them up here.

In the lower one I've applied a Super Depth of Field effect. I'm a bit dissatisfied with the colours, (after all I did try to make it look like night on a daylight map, so it's my own fault,) as well as the fact that you can't see very clearly that the cars at the bottom of the dam are supposed to look like police cars, but looking at the picture as a whole I'm pretty content with how it turned out. I wanted to have a helicopter that was aiming a spotlight at the guy hanging from the edge, but when I tried it it didn't look good, so I abandoned the idea entirely. It was for the helicopter I left so much space on the right side of the picture, and I didn't bother to change the angle after I removed it.

This picture is supposed to look like it's taken from the climactic scene of some action movie. The "hero" of the nonexistent film is hanging from a ledge and the villain is about to kick him down. Usually in this kind of scenes, something unexpected happens and the villain gets thrown down instead. (Though there are many exceptions to that "rule".)

When making this picture, I did some work on details that aren't really that clearly visible. For instance, this is what the congregation of "police cars" and "police officers" looks like from down on the ground:

Yes, I used metrocops to represent standard cops. So what? You can't tell from up there, can you? However, something that I discovered you can tell is how they are standing. First, I threw in a bunch of NPCs and let them stand in their starting position, but you could clearly tell even from the top of the dam that they were not looking upward. Therefore I flew up and positioned my player character some distance up along the wall and turned on the AI, hoping that they would point their guns at me... That's when I realized I had the NPC weapon override setting set to Default, meaning that they weren't carrying guns - they were carrying stunsticks, so they just held their hands in the air and stood in a pose that from the top of the dam looked very monkey-like. Damn. Therefore I had to remove all of them and replace them with new metrocops that were carrying pistols, after which I repeated my hover-in-air-activate-ai-deactivate-ai-process once more. Next, as you can see in the image, I moved them to better positions.

In case you wonder why the lights are hovering above the cars instead of being attached to them, I can tell you that they actually are attached to the cars. The collision box is much larger than the visible model for some reason.

Apart from all of this, the guy hanging from the ledge actually isn't hanging straight down. I tried that first, but it just looked weird, so this is what the final version looks like from the side:

I first intended to use a ragdoll from the Suits and Robbers pack as the "villain", but they were too flingy, so I used a ragdoll from the Metropolice pack instead.

UPDATE: While I'm at it, I might as well throw in a version of the picture that has all the posing done, but lacks the NPCs, fog and colour modification:

Addons used:
gm_Valley
Enhanced Citizen Redux
Tesla Model S
Metropolice Pack (NPC's, playermodels)

Explosion Day

"This is just like Christmas. No, it's better than Christmas. It should be its own holiday; 'Explosion Day'!" (Quote from the Adventure Sphere in Portal 2.)

For some reason I couldn't spawn any of the props from the Portal spawnlist, so the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device seen in the picture is from an addon that I due to some lucky coincidence had installed a few days earlier. I mean, the spawnlist was there in the menu, but none of the props would spawn when I clicked their icons.

I don't really know what to say about this picture. It's a guy jumping off a lighthouse as it explodes. All characters (including the dropship) are ragdolls.

Addon used:
portal2 bots

Keeping Watch

So, once again I made all the post-processing in pixlr. This time I just messed around with the colours. The picture was originally greenish, and I wanted it purple-ish (or purplish or whatever. My grammar is not that good). After some random experimentation with the level- and curve adjustments, I got the picture to look pretty much the way I wanted it to. I wanted a colour scheme that resembled the one from the map DM-HeatRay in Unreal Tournament 3.

It's supposed to look like the resistance member is about to attack the three metrocops, and like the metrocops are being lazy instead of keeping watch, and therefore haven't noticed him. (His arm is actually visible from where they are standing.)

The rebel and the two leftmost metrocops are ragdolls, while the manhack and the metrocop that is furthest away from the camera are live spawns. (I'm still sticking to the terminology described in that link I mentioned in my second post.)

There were a lot of open spaces in the map where this picture was taken. (The train station from Half-Life 2: Episode 1, by the way.) There were very little props lying around, so I had to come up with something to put in to make the picture not look so empty. Therefore I placed out the two barrels and the supply crate. I still think the floor looks pretty empty, but I couldn't come up with anything to put there that didn't look out of place.

This time I didn't use any addons.

Retro Metro

Finally a new update, after months of inactivity! I haven't been in the mood for Gmod lately.

I originally wanted another colour scheme for this picture, as well as add rain to it, but that didn't work out well.

All post-processing was done in pixlr this time.

I intended to make it look like the guy in the brightly coloured suit was being kidnapped by the people wearing black suits. I don't know if I succeeded or not.

Addons used:
Shibboro Cigarettes
1969 Dodge Charger
Suits and Robbers

A rainy day near the beach

I have so many things to tell about this picture. First of all, I actually came up with a small backstory for the characters in order to make it easier for me to decide what objects to include in the picture. These three people are travelling from [some place] to the rebel camp near the antlion beach (the camp in HL2 where you get the pheropods). However, they have been staying in the small house in the picture for a while in order to stock up on supplies before they can move on. I won't write the rest of the story here, thus leaving more space for reader/viewer interpretation, but every single object in the picture is there for a reason (except the explosive barrel).

The label of the explosive barrel is in the exact center of the picture. It was done intentionally.

I put a couple of dirt emitters outside in order to try to make it look like it was raining. It didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted it, but it was good enough.

In order to get the glow from the muzzle flash, I put an invisible light inside it.

The antlion is a ragdoll. Antlion ragdolls are incredibly hard to pose. Luckily, I managed to pick an angle where most of it is hidden by the wall, so you can't really see how bad it's posed.

When it comes to colours and post-processing, all of it was done in-game. I messed around a lot with colour modification, bloom and super depth of field to make this picture. To be more precise, in colour modification I set the blue add value to 1 and the red multiply value to 3. I also increased the contrast, lowered the saturation, and lowered the brightness. For the bloom effect, I chose a blue bloom colour. All of this gave me a nice blue-orange colour scale. Actually, when it comes to blue and orange, I suggest reading this blog post I found a while ago. Seriously, if you read it you will notice it in every movie you see that was made within the last 30 years. Video games too, for that matter.

Addons used:

Enhanced Citizen Redux

More Emitters

Easy Bodygroup Tool

Campfire

Yes! Finally something new! Now maybe I'll be able to come up with more ideas, so I can update this blog more often again. At least I hope so.

This picture was taken near the end of the Water Hazard chapter. There's a hidden cave there where you can find a vortigaunt. There's also an achievement for finding him (in Half-Life 2, not in Gmod). The vortigaunt on the right is that specific NPC. Garry's Mod messes up the faces of every single vortigaunt in the game, so I had to use the face poser on him.

I originally intended the leftmost vortigaunt to be sitting down with his legs crossed, instead of lying down. However, the ragdoll was not flexible enough, so I let him lie down instead. Actually, it even looks better with him lying down than it would have if my original idea had worked, because by making him lie down I was able to include the subtle detail of him resting his head on that little extra-arm that vortigaunts have.

The vortigaunt in the middle, standing behind the fire and holding a spear, uses a model that is slightly different from the other two. In the beginning of the Point Insertion chapter, you see a vortigaunt that's wearing restraints, implying that he's a slave. The vortigaunt here is a ragdoll of that model. You can see the restraints if you view the full-size version of the picture (by clicking it).

I did some colour modification on this picture. I made it a bit darker and increased the contrast, so I could get darker shadows. However, when I did so the picture got very red. Sure, I wanted red to be the most prominent colour, but it got too red, so I made sure to add some blue and green to neutralize a little of the redness.

In this picture, I didn't use any addons.

A couple of old pictures

In order to keep this blog going during this period when I'm out of ideas, I'll post a set of pictures I made a while ago. I must have been very tired when I made these, otherwise I would never have come up with the idea of putting Garrus Vakarian holding a guitar, wearing sunglasses, and getting blown up along with Legion.

The guitar is not an addon. It's there in Gmod from the beginning. In the "Spawnlists" tab you can find it at Browse\Games\Garry's Mod\props_phx\misc.

When I made these pictures, my inital idea was just to make the first of the pictures. The explosion and the inclusion of Legion was something I came up with in "the heat of the moment" (pun intended).

Actually, when posing Legion for the second picture, I noticed that they (I call Legion "they" because it has more than a thousand minds within the same "platform") looked somewhat creepy in the dark:

Also, I made a shot of picture 4 from a different angle as well, but a flashlight is visible in it:

Addons used:
Garrus Vakarian (Mass Effect 3)
ME3 Legion
AvP Corporate Megapack or Metropolice Pack (NPC's, (sic) playermodels) (I don't remember which one of those two the sunglasses are from.)