Valve Releases Source Filmmaker Beta
sourcefilmmaker.comNeedless to say, as one of the few pro Machinima filmmakers in the world, I'm absurdly excited by this. Haven't used Source for years...
The key point about this tech? If you're using your own art assets, it's usable for commercial movie-making, with no license fee.
Any of the learned HN types know how the Source engine stacks up graphics algorithms-wise with other engines like Unreal 3 and Crysis? Specifically, how are their lighting standards, and do they support Global Illumination / Indirect Lighting stuff, and/or Ambient Occlusion?
Update - apparently they do support SSAO, but on a per-material basis. Not ideal, but hey. And they do Indirect Lighting, but baked, not dynamic.
Source isn't on the cutting edge, to put it mildly. It's continually updated to meet the needs of the games they release, but Valve's priorities are very different from those of Epic or Crytek.
Case in point: their toolchain remains good ol' Hammer, vis, rad, and bsp. They're stretching lightmaps to the limit with a toolset from Quake that's constantly being pushed. God knows how long it'll be before the returns from refactoring start diminishing... it'd make a good case study, actually.
I guess this will create a large market for assets which can be used within Source Filmmaker. Maybe Valve should open an asset store, like Unity's Asset Store, where you can browse & buy assets directly within Source Filmmaker.
I think that's part of the idea behind the Steam Workshop.
This looks really, really incredible. And they are giving it away for free, and you can even make money off something you create as long as you don't use Valve's assets. There's going to be soooo much awesome content that comes out of this. Way to go Valve, and congratulations to the SFM team!
Expect to see a lot more of this, this is exactly how we're developing the first computer-photographed feature film at Fohr.
We use Houdini's digital asset technology to seamlessly develop two version of each asset: one for the gaming engine, and one for the film-quality renders. We use the gaming engine to do all of the camera work, set dressing, initial lighting setups, etc. We can easily create any shot, just like Pixar does with their animated films. We use this ability to iterate on the story in the context of the fully edited film as we constantly increase production value in each scene.
Then, when a scene is solid, we move on to film-quality lighting and rendering. Our facial capture is done at 120fps with up to four RED Epic cameras, each with special stereo hardware we've developed (so up to eight 5.5 MP images are captured simultaneously 120 times a second). Along with the mo-cap data for actors, this allows us to finish the film entirely within the computer.
We're currently looking into Crytek's engine, and I guess we'll look into Source Filmmaker now too. It's a great time to be making films with the computer.
Sadly, the VC industry is completely dry in this area. I wonder what's up with that?
The world of CounterStrike just took on a whole other level (no pun intended). Whereas the likes of EA and Blizzard don't even release mod tools for their big franchises, Valve comes out of left field with things like this.
I look forward to seeing some high quality content in the near future, and will hopefully create some myself.
Have you ever installed the SourceSDK? It's an AMAZING set of tools, all authored and regularly updated by Valve, and has been around for many years.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SDK_Installation
Granted, this latest announcement is indeed a considerable leap even from the offerings of the SDK, since it looks to be aimed at the more non-technical user.
Its awesome that Valve releases their toolkit and I agree that most of the tools are pretty decent. Hammer (the level editor) is getting really long in the tooth though - it hasn't changed much fundamentally since Half Life 1 was released. And even then, it was pretty much just a third party editor for Quake (iirc - some of the details may be off).
I wonder how this compares to CryTek's movie tool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXnXOn7WRCs
The graphics seem a lot more realistic, but the Source Filmmaker might be easier to use.
Looking at demos like this really makes me feel inferior. Working on a wpf signal processing application, i'm having trouble enough to update a line graph in real time that has "only" 140k points as the user adjusts the inputs.
If you're good with speech synthesiser development .. now's the time to shine.
If you can generate credible performances with a speech synth, trust me, Source Filmmaker is the least of your opportunities. A number of people with a lot of money would be interested in talking to you...
Are you the Halo Machinima guy?
Nope, that would be Burnie Burns, I suspect.
I'm the guy who came up with the word in the first place and founded Machinima.com (amongst other things).
Well, he's one of them, though there were 3 guys who were all in on the genesis: Burnie, Geoff, and Gus. <bragging> I used to work with them (Burnie actually stepped down as CEO of a tech company to pursue RvsB while I was still working there). All very cool people. </bragging>
Pretty sweet though that you invented the term, I always wondered how that came about...
Ah, yes, of course. I know Burnie better than the rest of the RvB team, so I tend to think of him first, but that's unfair to Geoff and Gus.
This looks like fun to play with! Shame it seems to be Windows-only. Hope they have a Mac version soon!
Really excited to see what fan-made stuff comes out of this. The replay editor is a child's toy in comparison.
Some YouTubers like Shwiggan have been producing videos with the leaked version for months now. Here's a video where he demonstrates how he uses the software:
It's not exactly fan-made, but I'll be evaluating it for our current performance capture projects tomorrow/Friday. VERY excited.
Very nice and free. I wonder how tedious the process is.