[SFM] The Curse of Team Auto-Balance

When Valve announced that they decided to release their in-house animation tool, Source Filmmaker, for free to a few selected individuals (and not the 2010 leaked version), I was very excited. I immediately did not want to pass-on the opportunity and requested a beta-testing invite from Valve. Well, after weeks of waiting, my request was finally answered... two days just before Valve decided to release Source Filmmaker en-masse to the public. Bleh. @_@

Anyway, this animation itself took me over a month to complete. This is my first SFM animation I worked on, so go easy on me. Animation is based on an idea for a TF2 comic I had back in 2011, which I never got around to actually drawing it. So when Source Filmmaker was released, I thought, hey, let's turn this into an animation instead! So that's what I did.

I used only the motion editor for the entire animation. (I never even touched the graph editor at all!) Even the camera motions as well. It was indeed as difficult as it sounds, but it allowed me to produce more realistic motions compared to keyframe-based animation.

I rendered the whole thing using 64x depth of field, 64x motion blur and with ambient occlusion turned on. It took 5 hours to render, and then with an additional 5 hours rerendering everything all over again because of the need to fix just one mistake in a scene which for some reason I'm unable to ignore.