#sfm tips

I'm starting a new animation before I finish the other one, but I thought it'd be helpful to showcase how my animations function.

Firstly, I keyframe every bone on the body to help keep the graph editor clean, you don't want to have to work out which bone is keyed on which frame, and besides when the program automatically smoothens the animation by splining it, it'll smooth from one keyframe to the next. That can cause bones to start moving before you'd like them to if there's keys where a bone isn't framed. It's best to just avoid that and key everything in stepped mode (Keys jump from one to the next, like stop motion.).

Secondly, I don't have any set rhythm in which I place keys. On the graph you can see they're all quite evenly spaced out, but that won't always be the case. I key my frames based on the driving action of a character. For this shot, the driving action is the foot, and I animate everything around that. This usually involves animating the pelvis and foot first, then going back and animating the arms, head, shoulders, etc.

Right-click your viewport window and click Render Settings

Once you do that you’ll be taken to this window

Everything here should be the same as your end except for samples

I highly recommend setting these to the highest they go “1024 & 256″ it’ll make your posters look 100% better

Another thing to know is your camera settings your camera settings are very useful for great sfm posters

Now you’re wondering “how am i supposed to mess with my camera settings?” like this stinky

Right-click your Animation Set Editor window and click “Create Animation Set(s) for Existing Element(s)

and click the camera you’re currently using

Once you’ve done that you’ll see the current camera in the Editor click on it and you’ll see this

Now the settings you’ll want to pay attention to is

SSAOBias SSAOStrength SSAORadius

these settings will determine how your posters look

Now before you go ahead and mess with these settings, you’ll want to go back to your viewpoint options and click Render Settings again

and turn on Show Ambient Occlusion

Now you’ll notice that everything has gone into this B&W effect this is fine because it’ll really help with what you’re about to do

Now return back to the camera settings and mess around with all the SSAO’s The settings i use are

which results in

and when we turn Show Ambient Occlusion off we’ll see

Here’s an up-close before and after

Better looking eh?

Also the lighting i use is 5 different lights

[the 5th light is used for above light, basically just huge light that covers a lot of ground]

4 of the 5 lights use this setting

and the 5th light [the above head light] is using

Hope these tips help you out with all of your SFM making needs!

also the map i usually use is x

Here are some other guides that have helped me get to where i am with SFM today

I often get asked to make a tutorial on how to “make a good sfm” from various people. I usually tell them its mostly through lots of practice and hard work. but recently I realized I wasn't actually addressing the real question. How do you find good resources and fixes to problems you may run into, but don’t know how to describe. or worse, even know a solution exists for? of course depending on your level of “google-fu” you can often find the answer with a bit of digging, but that takes time away from your actual project. And while I do plan on making a large “SFM essentials” video at some point its still a long ways off. 

So in the mean time I have compiled a playlist of videos that have helped me the most over my 4 years of using source filmmaker. My hope is that this helps people find solutions to issues they may be running into while getting a better understanding of the tool overall.

This playlist covers Cinematography, animation, lighting, particles, scene-builds and helpful tips and tricks.

I will be constantly updating the playlist as I find more videos that help me with issues I come across (yep i’m still learning new things 4 years in)