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Description
We live in cities you’ll never see on screen
Not very pretty, but we sure know how to run things
Living in ruins of a palace within my dreams
And you know, we’re on each other’s team

Ever since Valve published the first Meet the Team short to promote Team Fortress 2, I’ve been a big fan of their in-house cinematic program called the Source Filmmaker. It was a toolset that allowed them to create cinematic movies using the architecture of the Source engine. And when it was finally released to the public after Meet the Pyro came out, I was super excited.

It didn’t surprise me to see people quickly using SFM to create MLP related content (TF2 and MLP just really go well together for some reason) and I honestly had mixed feelings about that. On one hand the ponies don’t look quite right in 3D, but on the other hand they can also look really pretty, but on the other hand a lot of the SFM pony stuff would look better in flash, but on the other hand software like SFM is really the only way to put together some of these movies in a spectacular way…

…well you get the idea.

Anyway I downloaded SFM shortly after it became available, but for the most part it sat unused on my PC. I decided to brush it off and try my hand at some stuff with it. I’m mainly starting off will still images to learn the basics of the program before I move onto to more complex projects.

So this is the result of my first test: the Scout and Rainbow Dash chatting in an alleyway on the koth_king map. Overall I’m happy with how this turned out, not just the pic itself but the process of making it. It took me some time to learn my way around SFM but I eventually started to get the hang of it. Hell the UI reminded me a lot of Poser, in fact it was really similar.

Even so, this pic isn’t really that much. I chose this part of the map because it seemed pretty interesting in terms of a visual perspective. The Scout was mainly posed through a combination of preset animations as well as some manual tweaking. In fact, his pose is just his idle animation in the class selection menu but turned to the side and the position of his right arm and legs slightly modified. I tried to make it look like he was reclining against the box, the overall result isn’t perfect but I’m happy with it. Also I gave him the Winger pistol because when I tried to pose the Scattergun, it just looked too big and unwieldy to work with the scene, so I gave him a pistol instead.

Rainbow Dash was pretty simple. It was just spawning her, putting her in front of the Scout, and rotating her to face him. The reason why she looks rather static is because this is the Gmod NPC version of her. I do have the SFM rigged version but unfortunately every time I tried to spawn her, the program crashed. I was originally going to use the anthro Rainbow Dash model for the Scout, but I couldn’t get the pose and facial expressions to look right, so I decided "screw it" and just went with the Gmod Dash. I still wish I could’ve used the SFM version of her as I would’ve done a bit more with her, but she still looks okay.

Lighting is pretty much the same as the map in TF2, except slightly turned down in order to give a more "darker" feel. The only additions are 2 spotlights, a red one that’s above and to the right of the characters, and another off to the left that was put in there to better highlight the Scout. For the red spotlight, I wanted it to appear to radiate from a neon sign that’s just out of frame of the pic. It took a bit to get the radius and intensity of the light to blend in just right with the pic, but I’m happy with my overall solution: it highlights the characters in relation to the background, but it’s not bright enough to draw attention away from it either.

So overall, I do like how this turned out. I had fun making it, I don’t feel like a ton of my time was wasted, in fact other than the fact the program had a tendency to crash I really enjoyed using SFM.

I’m really eager to do some more experiments with this program, as I want to see just what I can do with it once I got its mechanics down pat.

Oh and as to why I included lyrics from Lorde’s "Team?" I don’t know, I just kinda felt they fit with the overall pic.

Description
We live in cities you’ll never see on screen
Not very pretty, but we sure know how to run things
Living in ruins of a palace within my dreams
And you know, we’re on each other’s team

Ever since Valve published the first Meet the Team short to promote Team Fortress 2, I’ve been a big fan of their in-house cinematic program called the Source Filmmaker. It was a toolset that allowed them to create cinematic movies using the architecture of the Source engine. And when it was finally released to the public after Meet the Pyro came out, I was super excited.

It didn’t surprise me to see people quickly using SFM to create MLP related content (TF2 and MLP just really go well together for some reason) and I honestly had mixed feelings about that. On one hand the ponies don’t look quite right in 3D, but on the other hand they can also look really pretty, but on the other hand a lot of the SFM pony stuff would look better in flash, but on the other hand software like SFM is really the only way to put together some of these movies in a spectacular way…

…well you get the idea.

Anyway I downloaded SFM shortly after it became available, but for the most part it sat unused on my PC. I decided to brush it off and try my hand at some stuff with it. I’m mainly starting off will still images to learn the basics of the program before I move onto to more complex projects.

So this is the result of my first test: the Scout and Rainbow Dash chatting in an alleyway on the koth_king map. Overall I’m happy with how this turned out, not just the pic itself but the process of making it. It took me some time to learn my way around SFM but I eventually started to get the hang of it. Hell the UI reminded me a lot of Poser, in fact it was really similar.

Even so, this pic isn’t really that much. I chose this part of the map because it seemed pretty interesting in terms of a visual perspective. The Scout was mainly posed through a combination of preset animations as well as some manual tweaking. In fact, his pose is just his idle animation in the class selection menu but turned to the side and the position of his right arm and legs slightly modified. I tried to make it look like he was reclining against the box, the overall result isn’t perfect but I’m happy with it. Also I gave him the Winger pistol because when I tried to pose the Scattergun, it just looked too big and unwieldy to work with the scene, so I gave him a pistol instead.

Rainbow Dash was pretty simple. It was just spawning her, putting her in front of the Scout, and rotating her to face him. The reason why she looks rather static is because this is the Gmod NPC version of her. I do have the SFM rigged version but unfortunately every time I tried to spawn her, the program crashed. I was originally going to use the anthro Rainbow Dash model for the Scout, but I couldn’t get the pose and facial expressions to look right, so I decided "screw it" and just went with the Gmod Dash. I still wish I could’ve used the SFM version of her as I would’ve done a bit more with her, but she still looks okay.

Lighting is pretty much the same as the map in TF2, except slightly turned down in order to give a more "darker" feel. The only additions are 2 spotlights, a red one that’s above and to the right of the characters, and another off to the left that was put in there to better highlight the Scout. For the red spotlight, I wanted it to appear to radiate from a neon sign that’s just out of frame of the pic. It took a bit to get the radius and intensity of the light to blend in just right with the pic, but I’m happy with my overall solution: it highlights the characters in relation to the background, but it’s not bright enough to draw attention away from it either.

So overall, I do like how this turned out. I had fun making it, I don’t feel like a ton of my time was wasted, in fact other than the fact the program had a tendency to crash I really enjoyed using SFM.

I’m really eager to do some more experiments with this program, as I want to see just what I can do with it once I got its mechanics down pat.

Oh and as to why I included lyrics from Lorde’s "Team?" I don’t know, I just kinda felt they fit with the overall pic.