However, the greatest improvement in Source 2 is not it's graphical fidelity, but rather it's brand new pipeline for custom content. As Source 2 is still in it's early stages, I think you may find yourself a little bit concerned with the lack of content available in Source Filmmaker.
Source Filmmaker's ubiquity in the machinima world is due to the fact that Source 1 was an intensely modifiable engine with almost 15 years of documentation and community to go along with it. And while documentation is still coming out for it, the community has put together a ton of resources to make maps look good. Other than that, if you're used to scene-building in Source 1 Filmmaker, you will find that Hammer is much more suitable for this task. You can model something entirely using Hammer's tools, then export that as a. No need to import every single model from another game, you can now just import world geometry directly into Hammer and modify it manually using Hammer's new mesh-based modeling tools! You could even import the whole map from some other game!Īlso, Source 2's Hammer being a fully fledged modeling program has it's own extra bits of flair. This can have a lot of benefits, most importantly the ability to import model files from other programs directly into the map as world geometry. It's slow, but creates beautiful maps and is why Alyx has the upper hand in VR fidelity right now.įor this reason, it is recommended that users of the S2FM get acquainted with building maps on their own in Hammer. So Half-Life: Alyx uses a new, still work-in-progress system called VRAD3, which is built off of Valve's old VRAD and VRAD2 baking processes. Where some modern engines are concerning themselves with realtime global illumination and raytracing, Valve considers baked lighting to be the best for their VR, performance-driven platform used in Half-Life: Alyx. The biggest one most people will be familiar with is volumetric lighting, which used to be available on a per-light basis, but is now defined by the map you are making videos in. For most cases, this is good, however it does limit you when you want to utilize some of the advanced graphical techniques available in Source 2. mdl.Ĭoming from Source 1, you may be expecting to go into a retail or workshop map and just start building a scene around that. These usually have analogs to old file formats from Source 1, such as. vmat, and more files of that nature inside "content" to store the text data used to compile into the game. So there's a lot of confusing information there, but essentially, when you're making content like models and materials, they exist in "content" and if you're just using them in SFM or Hammer, that content exists in "game". vpk is inside "hlvr/maps", or game content if it's inside a pakXX.vpk file.
vpk, which can either store map data, if a.
"game" is a more familiar file structure, this is where "compiled" content exists, so it is where you will find Valve's new file formats like. tga/.png/.psd, and other sources are stored inside of the game's "content" directory, found in the Half-Life: Alyx directory next to "game". All of the raw files that make up the game's content, such as. Source 2 uses a new content pipeline, which is built off of Valve's content system they've been using internally since Source 1. Note: This gets a bit technical, so hang in there.