OT: Valve Source Filmmaker

[Adam Portnoy]

That is really brilliant. It’ll be interesting to watch it develop.

[Andrew Kimery]

The good news is you can condense an entire animation studio onto a single PC. The bad news is you are now expected to do the work of an entire animation studio! 😀

[David Lawrence]

Nice to see Valve bringing what looks like some great tools to the public.

There’s a huge subculture of filmmakers using game engine technology to make animated films. There are already some classics in the genre like Red vs. Blue.

Here’s a great website to learn more about it if it’s new to you:

https://www.machinima.com/

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl

[Andy Neil]

I won’t lie. When I first saw this yesterday, I thought of making my own animated film. If it works as shown, it could explode the DIY machinima and animated sub-culture out there.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Shawn Miller]

Crazy!! I wonder what professional previz artists think about this. For low budget and microfilmmakers, this could be huge.

Thanks for posting, Andy.

Shawn

[Dustin Parsons]

[Shawn Miller] “Crazy!! I wonder what professional previz artists think about this. For low budget and microfilmmakers, this could be huge. “

My thoughts exactly. I think the potential for disruption will happen when people can share/sell models they’ve created that can be imported into the Valve Source Filmmaker engine, that’ll opens up endless possibilities for creating quick animations. It won’t destroy the large facilities that have to do specific custom work for movies and tv but for anyone who’s ever watched Red vs Blue, I think the writing is on the wall that with a good story and this new software people can make some pretty cool content.

[Bernhard G.]

This here is explicitly targeted to big cinema production:

https://mycryengine.com/index.php?conid=59

According to an interview with one of the developers
I read in the DigitalProduction Magazine (german),
the Cryenigine isn’t at the level of Avatar yet…

Best regards,
Bernhard

[Phil Hoppes]

I do 3D for a living. There is no free lunch. This is a very cool tool to say in the least. But…. there is a HUGE and do mean HUGE amount of work that goes into preparing all of those assets just so you can make that movie. The set is an entire 3D model, detailed and textured. Each character has been created inside a 3D app (Maya, 3dsMax, Modo, etc.), rigged and textured. These are not trivial tasks. Granted, there are free assets you can get and use but the more you use of someone else’s the less unique your production will be.

Now, that being said, making an animation by basically doing a screen capture from playing the game is quite cool and a very rapid way of making an animation. It will be interesting to see where this goes. The other up and coming method for rapid animation is motion capture. (Mocap) There are some amazing strides being made using something as simple as a Kinect fed into Autodesk MotionBuilder that is tied to 3D models that have been built and rigged inside Maya, Max or Softimage. With these techniques coming out I would not want to be just an animator exclusively as it is easy to see this task is rapidly being replaced by alternate methods.

[Chris Harlan]

[Shawn Miller] “Crazy!! I wonder what professional previz artists think about this. For low budget and microfilmmakers, this could be huge.

Thanks for posting, Andy.

Shawn”

Five or six years ago, we were doing pre-viz using Second Life. That was a trip.

[Gary Huff]

[Phil Hoppes] “Granted, there are free assets you can get and use but the more you use of someone else’s the less unique your production will be.”

You make very valid points, Phil, but I think this tool is more for those people looking to make movies utilizing the Valve character assets that already exist, as opposed to making all new assets.

There is a smorgasbord of videos utilizing these pre-existing Valve characters, mostly using Garry’s Mod from Half-Life 2. I think this was Valve’s response to that, making it easier to create such videos, instead of trying to capture the 3D modeling market.