If you have any Source-engined game, you really should have Garry’s Mod. Mod players laugh whenever they hear GTA IV referred to as “the ultimate sandbox” - that’s just jumping through a series of car-themed hoops. Garry’s mod gives you command of fully realised physics, a boatload of tools (many of which either explode or cause other things to explode), and shouts “DO STUFF!”

And what stuff people have done! From Rube Goldberg machines to machina, to simply answering the question “Who would win between a thousand ant-lions and a thousand combine sentry guns?” (Answer: they will team up to defeat your CPU). One use you’ve seen more than most is making an introductory image to a game server - it beats the hell out of a block of text, because as the tabloids keep reminding us, all video-gamers are too busy practicing murder to read. Which technically means that you don’t exist, but we’ll ignore that and give you five handy hints for making your own server image.

1. Choose the camera angle first

Before you start flinging things around with the physics gun (as awesome as that is), use a more powerful weapon - your imagination! Don’t worry, we haven’t gone Sesame Street on you. Just pick the angle you want to take the image from and spawn a camera there right at the start. It will save an enormous amount of frustration if you know now what you’re trying to create rather than constantly re-evaluating. Especially when you’re hosting a Garry’s Mod server and have five other users to co-ordinate.

Use the quick-key to check this camera as you build - you might initially imagine you’re going to build a perfect 3D world, but you’ll save amazing amounts of time just making things look right from that one spot.

2. Save Save Save

If you’ve performed more than two actions, even if one of those actions was “breath”, SAVE! For Heaven’s sake, SAVE you mad fool, and if you detect a tiny shred of personal emotion in this tip then well done Mr Holmes. Every second spent rebuilding a ruined set-up is a second not enjoying the fruits of your labours on your newly-decorated Garry’s Mod server.

Garry’s Mod lets you play with all the physics in the game - even the ones you don’t know about. One tiny “I’ll just nudge the dispenser a little to the left” and your hundreds of handcrafted props can go up like you dropped a stick of dynamite. Onto a nuclear weapon. Some items have field components that you can’t see until you let go and they suddenly shoot out of place and halfway across the map like a wrecking ball at an antique china exhibit.

3. People First

Just like the real world, people are more important than objects. Unlike the real world, you can strap these people to gas canisters and set off grenades without being locked up. No matter how awesomely sophisticated a set up you’ve got planned, place the characters first and build everything else around them.

The reason is that the rag dolls are the most sophisticated objects in any Source game - it’s what makes the shotgun so satisfying, but it also makes posing them with anything else in the way an exercise in pure monitor-smashing frustration. Set the models just so, SAVE, and make only the barest of adjustments after the fact.

4. Noclip is your friend

Not just for you flitting through the walls like an omnipotent and strangely firearm-obsessed god, but for your rag dolls. Once you set character in place right-click with the noclip tool to render them immaterial to any other objects. Even for pictures which require things to touch, you’ll find the it much easier to engineer if they can pass through each other (for example, this is how you make any character appear to be holding something: noclipping right into their posed hand).

In summary: to make things look real, you have to artificially make them exactly the opposite of that. At this point you should be gaining a better understanding of advertising, Hollywood and politics.

5. Post processing

Get yourself a nice graphics program. You might find it hideously boring to work with a program that can’t explode things on command, but this is how people used to create images back in the old days. Before that was the dark ages, where it is rumored artists used things like hairs of animals and dead trees and goo and who knows what else to make pictures, but I’ll tell you something - those losers never made any image as beautiful as a wrench hitting a spy.