It has finally been a year since I begun using Source Filmmaker for realsies.
Throughout the year of learning SFM, I got a stronger grasp on particle effects, lightning, and scene composition.
The SFM subreddit’s Discord has been incredibly helpful. Out of several other SFM communities, they’ve been up-to-date on the latest techniques and provide much faster constructive criticism and tips.
When starting off, it is always best to read up on a respective guide for whichever subject you’re tackling. For instance, when it comes to “swapping” outfits between characters, the idea of it seemed daunting until I read up a tutorial. From there, a lot of the art on a picture is left up to being a “puzzle” of sorts.
Due to my experience with Garry’s Mod, I got the hang of making SFM pictures after committing myself to making a SFM picture a day for nearly a month. I think I “got it” by the ninth day. Technically, it would also be my 13th SFM picture overall.
My skills aren’t still up to incredible par yet, as environmental lightning is still the toughest issue I always find myself puzzled with. I would always end up asking the SFM Discord for their personal thoughts on the picture. Lightning is typically the first and last part of tweaking the image to my specifications.
Much like making comics, I am a huge stickler for details. I look over literally everything such as the rim lightning on the characters, how the background looks, whether if I got the subjects in appropriately,
I still have a long way to go before I consider myself above-average.
I ran into a “Writer’s Block” for several months or so. Plus, I had to go through several Battle Passes in various games (blog post for that soon!), usually up to three BPs for 1-2 months in a year.
Whenever I boot-up SFM to resume a picture, it becomes a long and egregious process where I spend at least 5-20 minutes on it before taking a break for more than a day or week. Or a month. It ended up like my initial feeling with Gmod, where I usually don’t spend as much time as I wanted to on a picture or comic.
I figured much like back in 2019 where I streamed myself making Gmod comics, thus forcing me to spend two hours a session, I can most likely do the same with SFM. I just need to turn off the preview models so I don’t accidentally show something that breaks Twitch’s ToS. (don’t worry, I’ll explain that)
The Overwatch picture below was the last thing I worked on before taking a break from SFM for several months. This was primarily due to my sudden disinterest as I was taking hours trying to figure out the lightning.
Returning to SFM after that period, I discovered that some models subscribed through the Steam Workshop may eventually get removed. For whatever reason, the uploader/creator would also fail to provide a mirror in other sites too.
For another work I was doing, I subscribed to a Overwatch’s Null Sector model and spawned it in a map. When I returned to the project after the months-long period, the model was removed from the Steam Workshop and it only shows up as an ERROR sign. And it is not just that model, but for many other resources too that I have subscribed to.
There are also some models only exclusive to the Steam Workshop or a dedicated SFM resource site. For the latter, potentially the only available version of a model is NSFW. That’s the unfortunate reality of the SFM community.
As a model on the workshop is susceptible to being removed and the SFM site may not last a decade, it is far better to just keep a personal back-up of the resources on a flash drive and a personal cloud (Google Drive, Megaupload).
Specific models would get bugged if resized it. In the Overwatch D&D picture above, the giant robot miniature is a resized model. I wish I can pose it, but specific unposable parts would retain its original size despite everything else shrinking or growing.
After that brief hiccup of not using SFM, I am slowly getting back into it by continuing to make new artwork, though quite suddenly revealing Servers: Book 2 in the process.
The potentially upcoming webcomic is primarily why I am bothering to learn SFM, though plans can and will always change.
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