Source Filmmaker

[Collective Foal]

Why hasn't this thread been made yet? Anyway, I've been finding some good ones that aren't Meet the Heavy crap. Here's one that I enjoyed:

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Also, there's a guy whose YouTube prof is underage117. He makes some really good stuff. Here's one of them:

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[Chuckthe2nd]

Just downloaded it.

 

 

I have no clue what the heck I'm doing.

 

 

[Collective Foal]

Yea, Eedo Baba's told me it's a bit tricky to figure out the complicated stuff like lighting techniques and smooth animations, but the basics aren't too hard to get.

[Lord Sinister]

Why hasn't this thread been made yet?

 

I'm afraid there was: http://www.accursedfarms.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3107

 

Unfortunately people stopped posting in it after I posted in it.

[Chuckthe2nd]

Maybe a thread merge would be in order...?

[Collective Foal]

Well, the way I see it, that's just an announcement thread. This is about the actual software itself. But whatever. It would probably get more attention in the Valve subforum.

[Ross Scott]

The SFM seems very user friendly to me. Note that if you're going for true quality, it's a very slow process, but hey, that's animation.

Well I guess my point is, I like to be as efficient as I can about animation. Yes, good animation you have to do a lot of stuff step by step and there's no way around that. However once you've done a certain amount of work, if you have good software, you can automate and take shortcuts on a good chunk too. I think SFM takes some of that away and you have more lost time compared to doing animation in 3rd party software like softimage + an engine that supports more animation features.

 

And yeah, the 1080 problem seems to have been fixed.

 

Also it turns out shadows on added objects to your map (including characters not from the player recorder) don't work unless the light source is dynamic. So that means if your character is standing out in broad daylight, he's not going to be casting a shadow. You can even see this in the tutorial videos where the guy adds the pyro and wheelbarrow.

 

Also after spending some time with it, it seems like it is DEFINITELY less capable than Faceposer for gesture manipulation as well.

 

I'm almost ready to declare SFM a bizarre yin-yang against the Source SDK. Does the Source SDK do some things poorly? SFM does a great job of that! Is the Source SDK good for other things? SFM is missing those options entirely! Right now I think about the only thing they're equally good at is facial manipulation.

[Lord Sinister]

A fair point, I think leaving the threads as they are would be fine.

[Collective Foal]

Holy Crap, I just influenced the opinion of a mod. I think that makes me a demigod. Woot.

[Lord Sinister]

To make an additional point on my sound issue, it's not actually all sounds getting stopped as I previously thought; it actually appears that the Pyro's flamethrower sound doesn't seem to loop properly. I made a video of the issue:

[Lord Sinister]

Holy Crap, I just influenced the opinion of a mod. I think that makes me a demigod. Woot.

 

Then again, as Ross just posted in the other thread, it's no longer dead, so I'll merge them both. ;P

 

In addition as it's really for the creation of Machinima, it should probably be in the Machinima section anyway.

[Eedo Baba]

Just finished this, as my first real project in SFM:

 

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[The Scoutman]

Kinect MoCap seems to be an alternative for most of the animations issues:

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[Chuckthe2nd]

Now THAT is how you use Source Filmmaker.

[Alyxx Thorne]

I'm impressed by what people have done with it so far. Seems like a really good tool for upstarting animators. It sure beats the crap out of GMod anyway, which I never liked because nobody made anything worthwhile with it, people just jumped on the bandwagon to make crappy youtube videos with it.

[Vapymid]

It sure beats the crap out of GMod anyway, which I never liked because nobody made anything worthwhile with it, people just jumped on the bandwagon to make crappy youtube videos with it.

 

Well, the War of the Servers was done with it, also PixelEyes used it for Shell Life, and Xanatos. Not saying that it's better for filmmaking at all, but to give GMod justice, it was used not only for crap ragdolls posing clips (although some of them were pretty hilarious)

 

Regards

[Darthvoorhees]

Good stuff created with GMOD: War of the Servers, Combine Nation, Maintenance Man.

 

For Source: Filmmaker, it does seem like a good choice. Once you figure out how to do things. Minimal difficulty for someone who's used regular animation tools before. Although it IS a shame they don't have a "Save" function for animation, or support for the rest of the Source Engine stuff. (All has to be downloaded or converted)

 

Although as shown, work can possibly be minimized with motion capture via Kinect, this is not a new concept, I've seen a crude version on the GMOD website.