Source 2 Filmmaker

Launching S2FM

To launch Source 2 Film Maker, first install the Half-Life: Alyx DLC called "Workshop Tools".
Once installed, clicking 'Play' on HLA in Steam will let you select either the game, or the tools to boot up.
Starting the tools will bring up the Addon window. Here you should create a new addon with a memorable name (think of this as your Source 1 'usermod' folder) which will be used for all your custom assets, scenes, sounds, etc.

Main changes from the stand-alone Source 1 SFM app

• Camera and selection viewport changes for improved discoverability, ease-of-use and uniformity with other tools (like Hammer)
  • Game camera (aka wasd camera) manipulation now on right mouse drag
  • Moving the mouse into the viewport now automatically previews transform controls (without requiring the ctrl key to be held)
  • Transform control selection in viewport also no longer requires holding the ctrl key
• Rigging
  • Can now add and remove constraints one by one, in addition to all at once
  • IK constraint can now be applied to any bone that has a parent and grandparent
  • Added a spline constraint that can be applied to any chain of bones
• Per-shot maps
  • Loading maps is now much faster, enough so that you can scrub back and forth between shots with different maps
  • Can now have shots with no map, and a background color or image can be set per-shot
  • Can now change the map for selected shots from the timeline
• Dota-specific features
  • Added character picker that previews heroes and their item sets, and allows adding all the models and particles associated with a hero all at once
  • Changed rendering/recording filters to be specific to Dota (buildings and creeps, instead of static props and NPCs)
• Misc
  • Uploading images and videos is now done through steamcommunity.com, rather than from within the SFM
  • Instancing a particle system now creates a new particle system definition on disk, rather than embedding it in the session
  • 64-bit only, so you can create longer movies in more complex worlds, but also means that a 64-bit version of Windows is needed to run

New features in the Source 2 SFM

• Improved load times
• Better integration with other engine tools
• Dynamic & instant reloading of changed assets
• Progressive refinement is much faster for depth of field and antialiasing
• The quality of volumetrics lights is better before progressive refinement (and requires fewer progressive refinement samples)
• Added texture plane primitive for adding simple world-space texture billboards
• Now rendering directly to MP4 movie files using the H.264 video encoding and AAC audio encoding
• Viewport now instantly switches between interactive and progressive refined renders, instead of needing to re-render progressive refinement each time
• Viewport resolution can be changed dynamically, and movie layoff resolution can be higher than the viewport resolution (currently 4096x4096 maximum)
• Stick in/out on non-film clips now sets the in/out point of ALL selected clips, even those that don’t intersect the current time
• Animation Import (from e.g. FBX files) now allows manually connecting and disconnecting imported channels for cases where bone names don’t match
• Depth-sorting particles and light volumetrics can now be controlled by changing the depthSortBias attribute on the particle/light
• No longer clamping animation to channelsclip duration (fixing common confusion around animation freezing after 60 seconds)
• Added Dota-specific features such as global light controls: mapLightScale, timeOfDayAmount, and fog parameters as animatable controls on camera

Missing features from the Dota 2 SFM

• Phoneme extraction from custom sound files (but the vsnd files that ship with Dota 2 all have phoneme data baked in)
• Shift-time-preview and Shift-drag-time-selection gestures in the viewport (removed intentionally, since they were more confusing than useful)
• All effects clips other than texture overlay and grain/noise effects clips
• Python scripting
• SFM workshop integration
• HDR rendering
• Per-bone scale (per-model scale is still available)
  • Still available in non-slider form by manually adding a "scale" float to a bone's properties