Downloading now.

EDIT: "Valve, creator of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the open beta release of Source Filmmaker (SFM), for free, to everyone." Okay, apparently I didn't get a key, but I'm still happy.

Groxkiller585 wrote:
I've been hearing rumors that you can export the edited animations to an actual model file, but that the exported file isn't .ani or .smd but some new format. Anyone got info on this/can confirm it, because it sounds awesome!

Yes, you can.

Either way I'm excited to use it. It seems pretty simplistic once you get the basics down but it takes awhile to get used to.

Materials and sounds and whatnot were easy: just copy the packed game files over to a new game folder and make the necessary changes to gameinfo.txt. The models had to be extracted and converted, but there a re a few nice tutorials for that bouncing around.

Since SFM is initially tooled for TF2, it doesn't have any of the Portal-specific entities in its engine. So while you can load P2 maps, the brush entities or props like buttons, item droppers, fizzler fields, and so on don't show up. Obviously one can simply create a normal brush with the fizzler texture, and I imagine you could just create static/dynamic props using the models, but they won't have any of their hardcoded behavior--you'd have to set their animations manually and "fake" the behavior. That's doable. I'll probably put together a set of custom SFM-only instances for things like the buttons and item dropper.

The real obstacle that I'm finding right now is the lack of rigging for the Chell player model. I don't suppose anyone happens to have an IK rig for Chell lying around, or the ability and will to create one?

RubyCarbuncIe wrote:
You know what's funny? I received a beta key the night before it went public. Worst. Beta Key. Ever.

Either way I'm excited to use it. It seems pretty simplistic once you get the basics down but it takes awhile to get used to.

Same here.

I have made a video with SFM for TF2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD9YhvTfSIo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHTo2cpC_aw

The thing that makes it a masterpiece is that I don't even know what the movie is about. Instead of the movie telling you the story, you get to delve into its complex and educational plot and interpret what the movie means on your own.

I'm doing a re-make of Suprise.

ChickenMobile wrote:
Can anyone get the Portal 2 Player models into SFM?

So far everything I've tried turns out to be a failure. It registers the models are there, but it won't load any of them.. I'm no expert with this kind of thing though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFKfANRl1f0&feature=youtu.be

Yay for bad animation!

Idolon wrote:
Also, something I made for the folks over at tf2maps.net:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tm9u7cQMLY

Dat bass...