Source Filmmaker, An Exciting Future!

Valve has been going crazy over the last few months with new releases, and one of the ones I'm most interested in is the Source Filmmaker. Source Filmmaker has been revealed as the tool that Valve used to create almost all of their cinematics over the last few years, ranging from TV advertisements for games such as Left 4 Dead 2 to creating the "Meet The..." promotional videos for Team Fortress 2.

The tool itself uses the Source engine to render everything, making it an incredibly powerful tool for creating content, ranging from still sequences to completely animated videos. Source Filmmaker, in its current state, allows the user to load any map that can be run in a Source game and use many of the assets from them, specifically some Half Life 2 props, almost all of the Team Fortress 2 props and in a recent patch the characters from Left 4 Dead 2 have become usable.

The actual animation part of Source Filmmaker is very easy to pick up. Anyone who's spent any time in an animation suite such as 'Flash' will be able to understand how the animation is created through a 'tween'. This is effectively where you tell the software what the end result should be, and the computer will calculate the motion for you; a very efficient and quick way to animate, especially with 3D models.

Many people expect SFM videos to replace the huge surge of GMod videos that began to appear on YouTube a while ago. There has been a lot of amateur content being uploaded along the same lines. Hopefully the new ease of use and accessibility will allow a new generation of animators to start creating con+tent and even some professional have started using the tool.

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Within half an hour of experimenting I created this very short clip;



But with a lot more time and experience, fans have managed to create some awesome short films, this being one of my favorites!