00 basics
Uploaded by SourceFilmMaker on 28.06.2012
Transcript:
Hey, my name is Bay Raitt, and today, I'm going to show you how to use the 3D world of Team Fortress 2
to create your own animated short film.
We're going to use a tool that I work on called the Source Filmmaker.
So let's begin.
The first time you launch the SFM, you're going to see a setup window.
This allows you to open up a recent session, create a new session from scratch,
or browse for an existing session from your hard drive.
Each movie created in the SFM is stored inside these session files.
So for this tutorial, let's go ahead and create a new session.
Go ahead and click on Create. You're going to get three windows:
the Animation Set Editor, the primary viewport, and the timeline.
And in the middle of the primary viewport, you should see some bright red text that says "NO MAP LOADED."
Congratulations—you've done everything right.
The reason you're seeing this is because the SFM needs to have a video game map loaded for you to be able to do anything.
Go ahead and right-click in the viewport, and choose Load Map.
By default, you're going to get a big list of all the maps that are currently synced to your machine.
There are some filters. This one filters by mod, and by default it's on all mods.
Down on the bottom here is a little text field.
I know that the map that I want to use is called "cp_mountainlab,"
so if I just type "moun," you can see that it shows me just the things that have "moun" in the name.
So I can see that "cp_mountainlab" is selected, and click on Open.
It'll take a second for that level to load.
While it's doing so, I'm going to show you a little bit about some of the UI that you might need to pay attention to.
On the very bottom, here, there's a game timer,
which basically shows you the time that the game currently thinks that it is, so it counts up.
There's also this memory footprint section, which tells you how much memory that we're using,
so currently we're using about 1300 MB.
And then there's the frames per second.
It looks like the map is loaded, so let's get started.
The first thing we need to do is we need to create a camera.
We have a shot selected, but there's no camera for the shot.
Down here on the bottom right of the primary viewport, you'll see a button that says, "No Camera."
On the right of that, there's a little pull-down, a little down arrow, so if you click on that, you can see a menu of camera operations.
We're going to go down to "Change Scene Camera" > "New Camera."
Now you can see that the camera button says, "camera1."
So if we click and drag in the viewport now, if I just drag to the right,
you can sort of just look around and see that we've got a map.
If I hold down the W key, I can move forward,
and if I hold down the S key, I can move backwards.
Now bear in mind that this is while I'm dragging,
so I actually have to hold the mouse down, and then hold the W key down at the same time.
If I hold down the A key, I can go to the left; if I hold down the D key, I can go to the right.
If I hold down the Z key, I can go up; and if I hold down the X key, I can go down.
There's also the R key for roll, and mouse wheel to zoom in or zoom out.
And you can do all these things at the same time, so you can sort of fly around, just like you would inside the game.
So let's go ahead and follow this dirt path down the road here.
This is a community map that was made as part of an art pass contest.
I thought it was a really good little spot that we could use for getting started in the tutorial.
We do a lot of camera puppeteering, so it's a good idea to really master how to use the camera,
so that you can get around very precisely.
You can also slow down the camera motion by holding down the Ctrl key,
or tap the Shift key to accelerate.
For those of you familiar with 3D modeling or animation systems, hold down the Alt button
and left-drag in the viewport, and you can orbit the camera.
Alt+middle-drag will pan, and Alt+right-drag will dolly in and out.
This is basically because we know that sometimes, when you're animating, or working on a pose, or working on a piece,
you'll want to be able to orbit around something like I am around this light.
You can think of it as a turntable like a sculptor would use to basically spin something around,
or a tripod where you're looking around.
It's basically just different ways of dealing with the mouse input.
It's a good idea to take some time to really master this,
because the key to making good movies is often good camerawork,
and being able to move around in the scene in a very comfortable way,
so we tried to combine the best of moviemaking and animation
with what players are already familiar with in gameplay, and we thought that this worked pretty well.
So I think what I'm going to use is this little section here where this orange truck is.
I want the scout to come and run around this little area here, so we're going to do that in a later tutorial,
but for right now, I want to show you how to set up a camera
and be able to still work with the scene without messing up that camera.
So this is where camera1 is placed, sort of aiming at this truck,
but let's say we wanted to go and look at the truck's tire, without messing up the camera.
To do that, we're going to use the work camera.
Before we switch to the work camera, we need to copy the current view into it.
To do this, hold down Ctrl and click on the camera button.
Notice that the text switches to say, "Work Camera."
By doing that, you've copied this view to the work camera.
So now the work camera is able to come over here and look at the truck's tire,
but when I click the camera button toggle, it goes back to the scene camera,
so I can toggle back and forth between the two, and not have to worry about messing up my scene camera.
So left-click toggles between the work camera and the active camera,
and Ctrl+left-click will copy the active camera to the work camera.
So that's the basics of working with the camera. Let's talk a little about working with time.
Down here in the timeline, there are two ways of scrubbing time.
You can grab the top of this blue thing, which is called the playhead,
and just drag it left and right, and that scrubs time.
You can also grab the filmstrip and throw it underneath the playhead.
And you can also hit the Spacebar to play, or click on the Play button up here on the time transport controls.
Mouse wheel will zoom out or zoom in.
It always zooms around the playhead, so wherever the playhead is, that's where it's going to zoom to.
Because the playhead gets used for a lot of different operations,
we tend to use Ctrl+Spacebar to review our work.
This will play the existing shot once, and then will return the playhead back to its current frame.
This will come in handy later.
Up arrow goes to the beginning of the shot, and down arrow goes to the end of the shot.
So if you have a lot of shots, this is how you navigate the sequence.
Down here on the bottom, where the playhead is square, if you click and drag that, it pans the whole view.
It doesn't actually change time, it just changes the panning,
and sometimes that's handy for being able to see areas outside the end of the view.
You can also click and drag in the ruler here, to make the time jump to that location.
And there's playback, loop, and bounce here, for playback controls.
So that's how to control time. This is how to control the view.
So go ahead and play around with it, get comfortable,
and in the next tutorial, we'll talk about how to actually put some things into the shot.
And don't forget, hit Ctrl+S to save your work.
to create your own animated short film.
We're going to use a tool that I work on called the Source Filmmaker.
So let's begin.
The first time you launch the SFM, you're going to see a setup window.
This allows you to open up a recent session, create a new session from scratch,
or browse for an existing session from your hard drive.
Each movie created in the SFM is stored inside these session files.
So for this tutorial, let's go ahead and create a new session.
Go ahead and click on Create. You're going to get three windows:
the Animation Set Editor, the primary viewport, and the timeline.
And in the middle of the primary viewport, you should see some bright red text that says "NO MAP LOADED."
Congratulations—you've done everything right.
The reason you're seeing this is because the SFM needs to have a video game map loaded for you to be able to do anything.
Go ahead and right-click in the viewport, and choose Load Map.
By default, you're going to get a big list of all the maps that are currently synced to your machine.
There are some filters. This one filters by mod, and by default it's on all mods.
Down on the bottom here is a little text field.
I know that the map that I want to use is called "cp_mountainlab,"
so if I just type "moun," you can see that it shows me just the things that have "moun" in the name.
So I can see that "cp_mountainlab" is selected, and click on Open.
It'll take a second for that level to load.
While it's doing so, I'm going to show you a little bit about some of the UI that you might need to pay attention to.
On the very bottom, here, there's a game timer,
which basically shows you the time that the game currently thinks that it is, so it counts up.
There's also this memory footprint section, which tells you how much memory that we're using,
so currently we're using about 1300 MB.
And then there's the frames per second.
It looks like the map is loaded, so let's get started.
The first thing we need to do is we need to create a camera.
We have a shot selected, but there's no camera for the shot.
Down here on the bottom right of the primary viewport, you'll see a button that says, "No Camera."
On the right of that, there's a little pull-down, a little down arrow, so if you click on that, you can see a menu of camera operations.
We're going to go down to "Change Scene Camera" > "New Camera."
Now you can see that the camera button says, "camera1."
So if we click and drag in the viewport now, if I just drag to the right,
you can sort of just look around and see that we've got a map.
If I hold down the W key, I can move forward,
and if I hold down the S key, I can move backwards.
Now bear in mind that this is while I'm dragging,
so I actually have to hold the mouse down, and then hold the W key down at the same time.
If I hold down the A key, I can go to the left; if I hold down the D key, I can go to the right.
If I hold down the Z key, I can go up; and if I hold down the X key, I can go down.
There's also the R key for roll, and mouse wheel to zoom in or zoom out.
And you can do all these things at the same time, so you can sort of fly around, just like you would inside the game.
So let's go ahead and follow this dirt path down the road here.
This is a community map that was made as part of an art pass contest.
I thought it was a really good little spot that we could use for getting started in the tutorial.
We do a lot of camera puppeteering, so it's a good idea to really master how to use the camera,
so that you can get around very precisely.
You can also slow down the camera motion by holding down the Ctrl key,
or tap the Shift key to accelerate.
For those of you familiar with 3D modeling or animation systems, hold down the Alt button
and left-drag in the viewport, and you can orbit the camera.
Alt+middle-drag will pan, and Alt+right-drag will dolly in and out.
This is basically because we know that sometimes, when you're animating, or working on a pose, or working on a piece,
you'll want to be able to orbit around something like I am around this light.
You can think of it as a turntable like a sculptor would use to basically spin something around,
or a tripod where you're looking around.
It's basically just different ways of dealing with the mouse input.
It's a good idea to take some time to really master this,
because the key to making good movies is often good camerawork,
and being able to move around in the scene in a very comfortable way,
so we tried to combine the best of moviemaking and animation
with what players are already familiar with in gameplay, and we thought that this worked pretty well.
So I think what I'm going to use is this little section here where this orange truck is.
I want the scout to come and run around this little area here, so we're going to do that in a later tutorial,
but for right now, I want to show you how to set up a camera
and be able to still work with the scene without messing up that camera.
So this is where camera1 is placed, sort of aiming at this truck,
but let's say we wanted to go and look at the truck's tire, without messing up the camera.
To do that, we're going to use the work camera.
Before we switch to the work camera, we need to copy the current view into it.
To do this, hold down Ctrl and click on the camera button.
Notice that the text switches to say, "Work Camera."
By doing that, you've copied this view to the work camera.
So now the work camera is able to come over here and look at the truck's tire,
but when I click the camera button toggle, it goes back to the scene camera,
so I can toggle back and forth between the two, and not have to worry about messing up my scene camera.
So left-click toggles between the work camera and the active camera,
and Ctrl+left-click will copy the active camera to the work camera.
So that's the basics of working with the camera. Let's talk a little about working with time.
Down here in the timeline, there are two ways of scrubbing time.
You can grab the top of this blue thing, which is called the playhead,
and just drag it left and right, and that scrubs time.
You can also grab the filmstrip and throw it underneath the playhead.
And you can also hit the Spacebar to play, or click on the Play button up here on the time transport controls.
Mouse wheel will zoom out or zoom in.
It always zooms around the playhead, so wherever the playhead is, that's where it's going to zoom to.
Because the playhead gets used for a lot of different operations,
we tend to use Ctrl+Spacebar to review our work.
This will play the existing shot once, and then will return the playhead back to its current frame.
This will come in handy later.
Up arrow goes to the beginning of the shot, and down arrow goes to the end of the shot.
So if you have a lot of shots, this is how you navigate the sequence.
Down here on the bottom, where the playhead is square, if you click and drag that, it pans the whole view.
It doesn't actually change time, it just changes the panning,
and sometimes that's handy for being able to see areas outside the end of the view.
You can also click and drag in the ruler here, to make the time jump to that location.
And there's playback, loop, and bounce here, for playback controls.
So that's how to control time. This is how to control the view.
So go ahead and play around with it, get comfortable,
and in the next tutorial, we'll talk about how to actually put some things into the shot.
And don't forget, hit Ctrl+S to save your work.