Followers of my Twitter account will know that I have spent the last week or so messing around with Valve’s newly released Source Filmmaker tool which has now entered open beta, which I thought would be a good time to put together a tutorial on how to get the Dota 2 content working inside of the SFM.
Source Filmmaker Tutorial
SFM Step 1
Download the latest version of GCFScape: http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=26
SFM Step 2
Launch GCFScape and open the “dota 2 beta\dota\pak01_dir.vpk” file:
SFM Step 3
Extract the “root” directory to somewhere on your hard drive:
SFM Step 4
Get the Source Filmmaker tool from the Steam Store: http://store.steampowered.com/app/1840/
Once you’ve installed it, launch the Source Filmmaker from the Steam’s game list, making sure to select the “Launch SDK” option:
SFM Step 5
Inside the Source Filmmaker SDK, under the mod category, press “Create New Mod” link and enter “dota 2″ as the mod name:
Once the mod has been created you’ll see the following (you can hit “OK” once you see this window):
SFM Step 6
Change the “Selected Mod” to dota 2 and click the “Set Selected Mod” link:
SFM Step 7
Go back to the Dota 2 content that we extracted from the VPK files.
Copy across the following folders: “materials, models, particles, sound” into the “Steam\steamapps\common\SourceFilmmaker\game\dota 2″ folder:
SFM Step 8
Next you need to mass edit the vmt material files, for this I suggest using Notepad++ using the “Find in Files” feature, which you can find under “Search –> Find in Files…”:
SFM Step 9
Using Notepad++’s “Find in Files” feature you need to find “CustomHero” and replace with “VertexLitGeneric”, filter for “*.vmt” and choose the directory “Steam\steamapps\common\SourceFilmmaker\game\dota 2\materials” making sure “In all sub-folders” is also selected:
Press “Replace in Files” when you’ve your options setup like above and you should see the following:
SFM Step 9 (Part 2)
It has come to my attention that more edits need to be made to the VMT files which will fix the problem with some props having texture issues when lighting hits them:
This extra step is basically a copy of the previous step but with one slight difference.
Using Notepad++’s “Find in Files” feature you need to find “GlobalLitSimple” and replace with “VertexLitGeneric”, filter for “*.vmt” and choose the directory “Steam\steamapps\common\SourceFilmmaker\game\dota 2\materials” making sure “In all sub-folders” is also selected:
SFM Step 10
You’re now setup for using the Dota 2 content inside of the SFM tool. On the SDK panel press the “Source Filmmaker” link under the Applications category (Make sure dota 2 is set as the selected mod):
Create a new session:
Load in a map:
I recommend TF2′s itemtest map for a quick/small map:
SFM Step 11
To load a Dota 2 model into the SFM you’ll see to create a new animation set:
Choose “dota 2″ as the mod and hit “Rescan”:
Using the navigation tree, expand the heroes folder and select a heroes` folder (if the hero is made up of multiple parts, you can find a guide on how to deal with those later on in the tutorial):
Pressing open will now place that heroes` model in the map:
And you’re done, you can find more advanced tutorials below.
Applying Hero Animations
Animations Step 1
Now that you’ve a hero model in the SFM, you can import their sequences via their animation set:
Animations Step 2
A “Select Sequence/Activity” window will now open, you can use this to pick an animation:
Animations Step 3
The sequence will then be played out during the current shot:
Dealing With Multiple Hero Parts
Hero Parts Step 1
A number of Dota 2 heroes have multiple parts to their models, in order to get them to work you’ll need to do some extra work.
For this example I’ll load in Nature’s Prophet’s (furion in the files) model and his horn model:
As you can see the horns are not attached to his head.
Hero Parts Step 2
Under the Animation Set Editor section, open the model’s tree and the unknown trees:
Hero Parts Step 3
You now need to connect the joints together, you can do this by dragging the matching joint from the base model to the one on the extra part:
Which will give you:
Do this for the rest of the joints (you can ignore attack_1):
Hero Parts Step 4
Once all the joints are connected you now need to switch to the “Motion Editor” (F3 is the shortcut), select the model part in the animation set editor and drag the “Zero” procedural all the way to the right.
Once you’ve done that, the part should now be in the correct position:
Using The Dota 2 Particles
Particles Step 1
Create a new animation set for a particle system:
Particles Step 2
Once the particle dialogue is open you’ll need to browse to the “Steam\steamapps\common\SourceFilmmaker\game\dota 2\particles\units\heroes” folder:
Particles Step 3
Once you’ve selected the heroes` particle file you’ll now need to pick which particle you want to use:
In this example I will pick Nature Prophet’s staff particle effect and set the “Emission Duration” + “Particle System Lifetime” to 9999.
Particles Step 4
Move the timeline half way through your shot and see if you particle effect is visible, if it’s not then you’ll need to disable/reenable the lighting in the preview window:
Particles Step 5
In this example I will need the lock the particle effect onto the staff once it’s in position:
Once in position you can lock it in a similar fashion to how we dealt with multiple hero parts:
If you’ve done it correctly the effect will follow the hero through what ever animation is playing:
Other Helpful Material
The official SFM Wiki: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Filmmaker
SFM Tutorial videos: http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/post.php?id=8065&p=1
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