Hello there human! I'm sure you looked at all the great SFM posters and asked yourself - "How do I make such great stuff like these?".
Well, you won't find a definite answer here, but I'll show you some mildly useful tricks and tips that you can use in your poster to make them better! Ain't that cool...

So you started the program and after a long time you loaded a map! Congratulations, your mouse clicking skills really paid off! First thing you'll probably notice is hella low FPS when moving around! Amazing isn't it? Well, that's the first problem that we're going to (probably) fix.

Right click your viewport, and go to render settings.
From there, uncheck Ambient Occlussion - you won't need that for now


This should really incrase your FPS. But you can do one more thing to make it even smoother! (or not, works for me)



Look at the bottom part of your SFM window, a timeline, amazing thing, isn't it?
Now, drag the yellow framed thingy from right to left, and leave just few frames, like that

And these simple tasks should really boost your FPS in SFM!

So you have your SFM running smooth like uhh butter, you big brained man, good job on that!

Now let's make a simple poster, and I'll try to explain *stuff* along the way.

Now, pick a good looking map,I'll use Hydro, because you can't deny that this map is really pretty.

Move around the map, and find a good looking spot where you want your character, leave your camera there and switch to Work Camera.

this looks good enough

Now spawn yourself a nice model (remember to pick the ones from tf_movies, they're much higher quality than the ones in tf folder), I picked Scout, and let's get to posing.

When moving the model around, you can press SHIFT so the model will stick to the ground perfectly.



To make the expressions look more realistic, make use of that L and R sliders right above the face flexes sliders. It will make the expressions more prominent on the side you've chosen.








Try to pose your character naturally, use references you can find online, move the spine and pelvis.

Yesss let's get to the best part, lighting, first off, make your character dark. How? Well, use my another guide https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1415482848

From now on save often (CTRL + S) because SFM loves crashing.


This is where the fun begins...

Spawn a light and drag it onto the viewport, so you will control it just like you control the camera.




Usually the best place for keylight is from the top, if a map have a sun, try to position the light in similiar position where the sun is, I did an extremely intelligent move so the sun on the skybox is behind the Scout, therefore I'll ignore the realism part, and place the keylight in this place:


Since we want good-looking light, lower the intensity to make it more natural and make the shadows sharper (to make it more natural). You can adjust the sharpness with ShadowFilterSize and darkness with ShadowAtten. Remember to add little bit of radius to the light, so it will blur out the pixelization.

Optimal settings that i use most of the time

One thing you should remember - NEVER use pure white lights. Play around with color till you get some natural looking one.


And now you got yourself a very nice looking keylight!

truly terrific

Now you want to get rid of the pitch black shadows. To do it, spawn a light like you did before, except now right click on it and click Disable Shadows, we don't need them for this. We'll also simulate bounce light here, since SFM runs on a old engine and doesnt have such things.
Place your in a way that it will light up your character from the bottom, like that:


Radius scatters the light around, the more you move the slider to the right, the more it will be scattered. We want that here, because it can create a smooth light. Tinker around with intensity, should be really dim. These are my settings, you can use them if you want.


Look at the ground on which your character is standing and color the light in similiar color, you can add bit of sun color too.




Right click on the light and click Copy animation set, then paste it, and position the light on the other side:


And from behind:

For this one you can turn up your radius or lower the intensity

First part of our bounce lights is done!



Take a gaze at the sky, blue and beautiful, and we're going to base on it our second part of fill lights.



Use the same settings as you used for the ground fill lights, if it doesnt look good tweak them. Place them in similiar position like the previous one, except you know, on top. Remember to give them a blue hue too!


And the fill lights are done!


Rim lights help your character stand out more, and you want that, right?
This one is really simple, spawn yourself a light, adjust the color and intensity, and place it behind the character, like that:


You can mess around as much as you want, as you can see, I added a second, blue one on his right side.

If you want your rim lights smoother, use radius.

This one actually should be first but im too lazy to edit it now

To get to the camera settings, click on the + and select create animation set for existing blablabla and select the camera

Switch back to your camera (Bottom right corner, click Work Camera) and let's get to tweaking it.
First off, lower the FOV, you don't want your character to be disorted.


Also move the bloomScale to the left, disable it completely, never use SFM bloom.

If your character doesnt fit in the shot due to this, just move the camera back. Remember, you need to have it selected to move it around from now.


This one is very simple, move around focalDistance till it will clip with your character and incrase the aperture. Aperture makes the background more blurry.


And that's all really

We're almost at the end, congratulations, you almost survived the most boring guide ever!

Remember the render settings from the start? Go there, and enable the Ambient Occlusion now, and turn up the Depth Of Field samples.The more you turn up the samples, the longer the rendering will take. Since nothing is moving in our poster, disable Motion Blur too.

These are in my opinion the lowest settings you can go with and make your poster still look decent, but 512 or 1024 samples is more recommended


If you turned up your Depth of Field samples, you got rid of grainy shadows problem, congratulations!

Anyways, Ambient Occlusion is a shading and rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. (thanks wikipedia)
To put it simple - if something is close to something, it gets darker in... that part where the.... things uhh... intersect... you know what, i have no idea how to explain it nicely but yea..

You have three settings in SFM to adjust it properly. You can find them in camera
SSAObias - controls how much the model needs to be covered to be darkened.
SSAOstrength - controls how strong the AO will be on the model (shocker, I know).
SSAOradius - scatters the AO around.

There's no singular and correct AO settings, but this is the one I used for this poster. You can adjust it however you want, just remember to always incrase your SSAObias, because if it will be low, it will make your characters kinda polygonal-looking.


Here's a really cool trick that not many people know about:
Right click on your camera > show in Element Viewer > Camera
From here click on the black bar next to SSAOTint and you can color your AO!


I picked kinda brown-orange, so it will fit the environment and lighting of the poster.



Now your poster is ready to render!


Click on File in top left, select export and then Poster. I recommend rendering in 4K, so your poster will look clean and sharp, and that's exactly what we want, right?


Select the format (pick tga or png please), click export and let it render. The speed of it depends entirely on how strong your PC is. You can change the path too, so you wont have to delve into the SFM folder to find it.

Now go into your favourite photo editing program and edit it to your tastes.









i refuse to edit this guide to fix mistakes, that would require effort and i hate effort
Check better guides for real help, like this or that.