Within the next few weeks we will be dropping out first update of 2026 which includes a very important change: Shader based skins.

Read on to find out more.

We were always limited in what we could do with Garry's Mod when it came to skins.

Our current rendering system, also known as Render Pipeline 2 effectively tried to replicate how a weapon skin shader would work by using material slots and duplicating the weapon mesh on top of itself to provide a wear "layer"

All of this came with a slight cost to performance (We are literally doubling poly count just to have wears)

It was also very terrible to make paint kits for, so the content creation experience wasn't great either.

It was also taking us a considerable amount of time to create and add new weapon skins to the game.

It was announced recently that Garry's Mod got a new ability to create shaders, but alas it is only a 2D space shader and we need to paint on 3D Models, however...

The first shader iteration only allowed us to have 4 texture samplers, which wasn't really enough for us to be able to replicate the shader that's found in CS.

However recently, Facepunch added a 8 sampler variant of the screenspace shader: We were back in business.

We started experimenting in late December/Early Janurary and found we were able to create a pretty good shader in 2D space, however as I said earlier, this was still all in 2D space, not 3D Space.

Doing some digging, we found that CS:GO (And CS2 even to this day) does composite shaders in 2D space and then uses what's called a Render Target to push it in to a proper vertex shader with lighting.

So we've taken the same approach. Every time you access a skin whether it's because you purchased it via the Buy menu or you're inspecting it in your inventory, the new composite system will render the shader once, store it and then show you the cached version.

Every time you inspect a different skin the result gets updated, the same applies when you switch weapon.

So we got it working and over the past few weeks we've written a brand new weapon compositing system, which to be honest was the easy part.

We're still the process of moving all items over from the legacy Render Pipeline system to the new composting system, this is the most time consuming part.

But the result?

Skins look better than ever, and we can now also use shaders to generate specular and metalic masks on the fly that also interact with wear, providing a really great, realistic finish.

So while the new system is great and allows both us and content creators to quickly and efficiently create content, the only drawback is the existing weapon skins in players' inventory.

These are going to look different to how they do now, there is no doubt about it.

You may prefer the changes or you may not like it, however we have tried our best to keep things looking the same as much as possible, but when switching from what is effectively an engine hack to doing it properly, things are never going to be 1:1

So, read below to find out what potential changes you may see when this system rolls out.

Previously we took patterns that were used by the shader to recolour and bake them in to patterns that are already the colours we want.

With that said, for a lot of the non-CS patterns, we do not have the original colour values that we used.

So some paint kits are going to have different colours to what they have now, and in cases where we used the exact same colour values, the output looks different as well.

This is due to what the new shader does, it converts all colour values from sRGB Gamma and converts them to linear values, as a result colours look different.

For certain styles such as Hydrographic, Anodized Multi-colored these should remain the same as they are today.

For patterns that use Spray-Paint or Anodized Airbrushed, these will look different.

As we can now do Triplanar mapping, these may look different especially on Spray-Paint finishes. For certain Anodized Airbrushed skins such as the Fade and Amber Fade, we are going to have to recalculate the offsets and rotations from scratch.

Currently there is a wear texture generated and "baked" for every weapon.

With the introduction of the shader, Wear can now use one single unified texture and in addition we also have grime that appears on skins as they wear.

For all existing skins, you will remain with a Wear seed of 0.

This means that your x, y and rotation of the wear layer will all be zeroed out.

However due to how things are done differently the wear may look better or worse, it is impossible to say which skins will look better or worse.

We have in a lot of cases converted skins to the new Gunsmith style, which instead of wearing down, changes certain colours (Think of metal rusting)

Some skins we've also added custom wear masks so important features never wear.

If when this rolls out you are unhappy with how any of your skins look like please reach out to us, in cases like this we are willing to do manual adjustments to make it look similar to how it was before, but please bare in mind we may not always be able to do this.

If this is something you'd like please head over to the Issue tracker and submit a Sensitive issue: https://lambda.tf/dev/1-garrys-mod/issues/all

For content creators, creating weapon finishes has never been easier.

When the update releases, you will have access to Lambda Workbench to create your own finishes either based on existing patterns or by creating your own.

Today we released our brand new documentation which covers everything about the new compositing system.

https://lambda.tf/docs/content-creation/weapon-finishes/workbench