#gpose comic tutorial

First, let me say thank you so much for your admiration! It really means a lot to me!💙

Now, I'll preface this by saying that I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to the tools I use to gpose. I'm still learning, but I'm more than happy to share what I've gleaned so far!

Let's start with what tools I use for gposing and comics:

XIVLauncher

Brio

Glamourer, Ktisis, and Penumbra (optional, but they have some interactivity with Brio that can come in handy)

Reshade using the Gposingway package (again, optional, but there are some really good reshade presets that can make some gorgeous screenshots even in my inexperienced hands!)

Image editing software (I use Clip Studio Paint, but I think what I do is pretty universal)

Photoshop FFXIV Textboxes by Vladdy

For this tutorial, I'll go over what I did to make the first gpose shot of this comic.

If you have Brio installed, when you first enter gpose, Brio should load automatically (Ktisis is there, too, but we won't worry about that for now)

The first thing I'll usually do is spawn all the actors I'll need for the pose by pressing either of the highlighted "+" buttons and selecting "Spawn New Actor".

After spawning all the actors you need, you can rename them in the actors list like I did here. It's not necessary, but it is handy when you have a lot of actors you're working with. As you can see, whenever you spawn a new actor, they're going to look like your pc in their vanilla game state, so you'll need to load an appearance over them. There are several ways to do this.

If it's a vanilla NPC you're after, you click on the highlighted "Load NPC Appearance" button. It'll pop up a window where search for the NPC you're looking for by name and it'll bring up just about every instance of that NPC from the game. It can be a little daunting sometimes because some NPCs can have hundreds of instances, but USUALLY they'll be listed in reverse order of appearance.

If you're a Glamourer user, you can load a saved Glamourer design over an actor as well! This is great if you have a saved design for a pc, especially not the one you're currently using so you can quickly load their customization options. For this project, I used a saved design for @feistierermine's Bunzo from Valentione's Day.

I don't want Bunzo in his Valentione's glam, though, so I'll need to change his outfit using Brio's Advanced Appearance window, which is opened by clicking the highlighted button while having Bunzo selected in the actors list.

When it first opens, the Advanced Appearance window will be on the equipment tab. Here you can change an actor's equipment anyway that you might need. Change gear, dye it, hide it, you can even spawn props in place of weapons! The Customization tab is used for making any edits needed to an actors character customization options. You can basically make a whole new character using this window!

Another way to load an appearance is to load a character appearance saved within Brio itself by using the highlighted "Import Character" button. You can save the currently selected actor's appearance by clicking the "Export Character" button (located to the right of the Import button).

Now that actor setup is finished, it's time to actually start posing! First comes placing the actors on their preliminary marks. You can use the values in the highlighted "Posing" tab to move the actor around. The top row of values is the actor's position, the second their rotation, and the third is their scale. You can either manually type in new values or click the values and drag left or right to change them.

It doesn't have to necessarily be the next step, but after the actors were on their marks, I started futzing around with the lighting. Brio can do way more advanced lighting than vanilla gpose, but I haven't really learned how to use it yet, so I just use the vanilla tools. Lighting is one of the things I have the weakest grasp on. I generally aim to place light sources that match in world sources, like the aetheryte and lights flanking the entrance behind the group. Then I mess around with the colors and intensity until I get something that looks good but doesn't stick out from the color scheme of the environment.

Now to start putting the actors in poses. Being the novice that I am, I do not have the skill to create poses completely from scratch. I'll either start with an imported pose created by someone way more talented than I or one of the vanilla emotes from the game that I'll then make any necessary small edits to to fit my needs for the pose. For this project I used emotes as a base for all the actors.

For my controlled character, I use the vanilla gpose interface to load up animations. I could use Brio to do this, but the in game interface is much more user friendly imho. For the extra actors, though, I use Brio's "Advanced Animation" control panel, opened by clicking on the highlighted button. In the control panel, you'll see two slots for loading animations. The top slot is for base animations. This is stuff like all emotes, animation cycles, even battle actions! The second slot is for blended animations like expression emotes or emotes that can be done in a non-standing position.

When the actor hits a point in the animation that works for the pose, hit the "Freeze Character" button to lock them in place for screenshotting or, as in the case with Y'shtola here, pose editing.

The base fem miqo'te Aback emote is a little too exaggerated for what I wanted to do with Y'shtola's pose so we're going to edit the pose using Brio's Advanced Posing panel which can be opened up by clicking the highlighted button in the upper right corner of the posing tab. The posing panel mostly consists of the actor's animation skeleton broken into several parts. On the right is the gizmo you can use to rotate bones you can select by clicking on the skeleton. Just click and drag along one of the gizmo's axes and the bone will rotate in that direction. Once a bone is selected, any child bones that will move with the selected bone are highlighted. Also notice that in the Posing tab in the main Brio window, the name of the selected bone is now at the top of the tab. Even if you close the Advanced Posing panel, you can use the values in the Posing tab to pose the bone.

Posing is a super finicky process and if you don't take into consideration how even something as simple as twisting a wrist can cause movement in the rest of the arm all the way up to the shoulder you can get some really distorted body parts. There's a lot of trial and error involved and get ready to make ample use of Brio's undo key!

Once posing's out of the way, it's time for the final touches! I'll position the camera and apply zoom and rotation to try to get a shot composition I'm happy with. I kinda just do this part by intuition. I know there are people that know more about the technical aspects of building shot composition than I do! The only "rule" I use is that if I'm rotating the angle of a shot, I'll try to find some part of the shot that I line up parallel with either the horizontal or the vertical axis of the image. In this case, I picked Lulu's head...

Which didn't matter because I went with a different angle anyway! 😆 Once I'm happy with the angle, I'll enable reshade and pick a preset that works with the scene, hide any open windows, and take my screenshot! Little bonus tip: if you're using reshade, use the reshade screenshot key, not XIV's! It won't pick up any open plugin windows so you'll only have to worry about hiding the gpose window!

Now that I've got my screenshot, it's time to do some editing!

This part is the easy part! I load my screenshot into my image editing software and I also load up the psd for the dialogue boxes.

You might have to reduce the resolution for the dialogue box psd if you're like me and have a potato pc that can only handle the game at 1080p! Then, you'll want to click on the layer folder shown in the example image and copy it and paste it into your screenshot from the game.

Once you've copied the folder over, you can go through the various layers, hiding what you don't want to use in your screenshot. I don't know if it was just because I opened the file in CSP, but it did rasterize the text layer, so I had to hide that and create a new text layer. It's not too hard to do, though. The dialogue box download includes the Meiryo font if you need to install it and it comes really damn close to the dialogue font used in game.

Once that's done, flatten the image and save it and that's it! You're done!