Clientside Change of Player Model

[Xappan]

So I was a bit bored by some of the good old models. They are good but switching the admin model to a furry for example makes all sits way funnier. DO NOTE that nothing described in this guide can make modifications to the server, these are called "clientside" for a reason, only you will see them.

Obviously subscribing to anything in the workshop isn't enough to override the server models, as in multiplayer the server dictates what addons the game can use. Well partly. Please do accept that ANYTHING I say from this point might be completely wrong, these are just assumptions I'm making from my own testings.

If you've played gmod back when it came out, or at least a couple of years ago, you will know that we didn't use to have a workshop, so we had to add addons manually. This was good because we got access to all files but made it tedious because we ourselves had to organize our own addons folder. This is important, because now we don't have to do this, however the addons folder still exists, and what is better, it has priority on clientside modifications over server.

What does this mean? This means if we can get our hands on some model and material files we can oh-so easily switch player models out. But how? Workshop doesn't download the actual files anymore. Well, except they do, bear with me:

Workshop files are packed into a .gma file. This is basically a kind-of packaged file that they make with the gmpublisher tool so they can put it up on the workshop. But Valve was nice enough to give us the tool to unpack these files and get to the juicy files we want. (please note that if the model you want from the workshop is not a .gma but a legacy file, you'll have to open it with a zip file handler (like 7zip), extract the file inside and give the .gma extension to that file, you can go on from there)

To switch any model (and we'll specifically talk about player models now) we need two things:

1. The model we want to replace it with
2. The path of the model we want to replace

Neither is hard but a step by step instruction is in order. I made some pictures to it so I'll link those too (I have to link because of the upload limit here). Let's start with getting a model. For my example I love the Elder Scrolls games, and I grew up with Oblivion, and always found the guards in that game iconic in many ways. So I want to replace the police model with the Oblivion guard.

Getting our model

1. First off we have to search for a model we want on the workshop. Make sure it is a player model, not only an npc. Once found subscribe to it (pic)
2. Secondly after we subscribed to it we wait until gmod downloads it. You don't have to launch the game, in steam it'll show like an update, once finished the game looks as usual. When this is done we go to our steamapps folder, precisely: steamapps\workshop\content\4000
3. Once here we sort by date and look for the newest folder. Once found we open it. (pic)
4. In it there should be a .gma file. We copy this into our gmod addon folder for ease of access. steamapps\common\GarrysMod\garrysmod\addons
5. We go to steamapps\common\GarrysMod\bin and find the "gmad.exe" file. We also copy this to our addon folder, for ease of access. (pic)
6. We drag the .gma file onto the gmad.exe and release it. This will unpack the contents of the file for us. In my case since the file was called "gmpublisher.gma" (as a lot of gma files are called, you might wanna rename it), I'll get a gmpublisher folder, with the lua, models, materials and sounds in it. The main point is the models folder, to the point where we can delete everything except for the models and materials folder. In the models folder you'll find 5 files to 1 model usually. (pic)
7. The files we have, by extension, are .mdl .phy .vvd .dx80.vtx .dx90.vtx. These are all necessary, so make sure you have them. Now we need our ingame model's path

Getting our path

The path is basically where the game stores the model internally, and we need the path, or moreso what the file is called, which is easiest to be seen from the path. Getting the path is quite easy:

1. Load into the server
2. Hold "c"
3. On the left click "player model"
4. Find the model you want and press right click on them. Press "Copy to clipboard" (pic)

And congrats you have your path copied! In my case it was "models/player/police.mdl"

The main thing we want from this is the police.mdl part. This basically tells us that our model is named "police". Now we go back to the addon folder, into the gmpublisher folder, models, player and find our files there. Than rename them to "police" while keeping the extensions. If done right you'll have:

police.mdl; police.phy; police.vvd; police.dx90.vtx; police.dx80.vtx

And we're done! We don't have to fiddle with the materials thankfully.

Now some downloaded models (like the one in the example) have different bodygroups (accessories on the model you can turn on/off) and to be 100% honest I have 0 clue yet how you can set the bodygroup you actually want, but this should overwrite the model with the basic bodygroup model of the downloaded file! Once I figure that out I'll edit this guide.

Hope this was understandable and followable, and that you'll have fun with it! If there are any questions comment them, and if I have any answer for it I'll happily oblige!

[nani]

this is cool and all but i dont think model flips besides your viewmodel (and making the charple lighter) are allowed, at least thats what ive been told

[Immersel]

can u make me a custom model and u can lick me as payment

[Xappan]

33 minutes ago, nani said:

this is cool and all but i dont think model flips besides your viewmodel (and making the charple lighter) are allowed, at least thats what ive been told

Charple? Or what do you mean viewmodel? If this is not allowed I'll remove the guide, didn't know it would not be allowed, I'll ask Noseian.

The only reason I decided to post this is because ultimately this doesn't really seem abusable to me. This is clientsided modification, so only you see it, if you change the model to something hardly visible thats only a detriment to you. Apart from this hitboxes are obviously not changed so if you get a very contorted model that is once again on you.
Afaik models respect the world lighting in gmod, so player models will be dark in darker places and vice versa. If you know how to make a skin have material which does not by editing it at that point this guide is probably moot to you as you're way above in level to what this guide details.

2 minutes ago, Immersel said:

can u make me a custom model and u can lick me as payment

I suck at blender mate, but can try to cobble something together. And sorry I'm past my licking days. Can boop you if you want.

[nani]

7 minutes ago, Xappan said:

Afaik models respect the world lighting in gmod, so player models will be dark in darker places and vice versa.

it is actually possible to give a material a different render mode to make it fullbright

[Xappan]

6 minutes ago, nani said:

it is actually possible to give a material a different render mode to make it fullbright

I know but as I've said if you know how to do that (which requires material editing I think) I think you'd already know how to do this.

[oosna]

On 5/9/2025 at 2:21 PM, Xappan said:

Obviously subscribing to anything in the workshop isn't enough to override the server models, as in multiplayer the server dictates what addons the game can use. Well partly. Please do accept that ANYTHING I say from this point might be completely wrong, these are just assumptions I'm making from my own testings.

There are many addons which change playermodels even multiplayer but Im not sure if they are allowed or not as they may provide advantage in some cases

[Xappan]

48 minutes ago, oosna said:

There are many addons which change playermodels even multiplayer but Im not sure if they are allowed or not as they may provide advantage in some cases

Ah if that is the case I might've missed them. I tried to change models by downloading workshop items but it seemed CG always overwrote them.