Needless 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...<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I look forward to seeing some high quality content in the near future, and will hopefully create some myself.
I wonder how this compares to CryTek's movie tool:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXnXOn7WRCs" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXnXOn7WRCs</a><p>The graphics seem a lot more realistic, but the Source Filmmaker might be easier to use.