Source 2 Filmmaker

Launching the SFM in the Dota 2 tools

• First, install Dota 2 if you haven't already
• Then, install Dota 2 - Workshop Tools DLC, found in the DLC panel of Dota 2 in the Steam Library view
• When launching Dota 2, choose Launch Dota 2 - Tools from the dialog
• The first time you run, select Create Empty Addon, to have a place to put your sessions and custom assets, similar to "usermod" in the standalone SFM
• After clicking Launch Dota 2 Workshop Tools press the SFM button in the Asset Browser toolbar

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
• Added mapLightScale, timeOfDayAmount, and fog parameters as animatable controls on camera
• 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)

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