Garry’s Mod – How to Add Custom Backgrounds for the Main Menu

This guide will instruct you on how to create, edit and apply custom main menu backgrounds in Garry’s Mod! And as a bonus, how to upload them to the Workshop.

Creating and Editing the Image

To add any backgrounds to the game, we will first need to download them and edit them accordingly.

Step 1: Get any image you want to add from the internet, or locate the file if it is already in your computer. Preferably, the image should be of at least medium resolution and have a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio, depending on your own game settings, otherwise it may look grainy or stretched when it shows up in-game.

Step 2: After retrieving the image, open it with any image-editing software like paint, GIMP or Photoshop. Here, you can resize them or edit out any details you don’t want to be visible when the background appears in-game.

Step 3: Save the image(s) anywhere in your computer, as either JPG or PNG

Adding the Background

Step 1: Go to your game directory. This can be done in two ways:

• Right-clicking Gmod in your library, then clicking “Browse local files”.
• Going to your Steam folder (C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam by default) and from there clicking on steamapps/common/Garry’s Mod/garrysmod.

Step 2: In the garrysmod folder, head on to backgrounds and ta-da! You’ve found the backgrounds folder. Move your image(s) here and open the game to see if they’re working properly.

Bonus: How to Upload to Workshop

Uploading Gmod items to the Steam Workshop has always been a significant hassle, and I can’t elaborate much on how to do it for this tutorial since that’s not what I’m trying to teach here. I’ll only be telling you how to organize your addon’s folders so that they can contain working backgrounds.

Step 1: Create your main addon folder, name it whatever you want. Inside the addon folder, create another folder named “gamemodes”, then inside that one, another called “sandbox” and then create one last folder inside THAT one named “backgrounds”.

Step 2: Place your backgrounds in the “backgrounds” sub-folder.

Step 3: Upload your main addon folder to the workshop via Gmod’s default addon uploading program or any addon uploading wizards on the internet.