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Getting Started

Filmmaker

The Pragma Filmmaker (PFM) is an addon for the Pragma Engine and is shipped with all Pragma installations by default. See here for information on how to install Pragma. Click here for more information on the Engine itself.

PFM is currently in a very early beta stage, it is not a viable replacement for SFM yet. You can use it for rendering, however the editing capabilities are currently very limited.

The primary goal of this project is an open-source, highly moddable alternative to the Source Filmmaker, with new features and quality of life changes. The project is still in an early state and is funded by Patreon supporters. Some of the current features include:

  • Support for various Source Engine and Source 2 assets, such as: maps, models, materials, textures, sound-script files and particle systems
  • Support for loading SFM projects/sessions
  • Can automatically locate assets of installed Source Engine / Source 2 games (as well as workshop addons and Gamebryo games)
  • Raytraced rendering with Cycles (the same renderer used by Blender)
  • External rendering tool for rendering in the background
  • Extensive modding support with Lua
  • Support for physically based rendering
  • Steam Audio support for spatial audio* (WIP)
  • Open source (Source Code available on GitHub)
  • Written in Lua to maximize moddability
  • Import and export capabilities for easy interoperability with Blender
  • etc.

Here's a comparison render between SFM and PFM:

Media

Usage

  1. Start Pragma and click "New Game"
  2. Select the map for your project from the map list. The map can currently not be changed through the Filmmaker interface (yet).
  3. Set the game mode to "Filmmaker"
  4. Press "Start Game"

If you're loading a map for the first time, Pragma will have to convert the map and all of its assets first, which may take several minutes. This only has to be done once for every map/asset, so loading should be faster next time. 

OnceFor the Filmmaker has been loaded, select "File -> Import..." from the menu bar and select your SFM project, then press "Open". This will once again start a conversion process, which may take several minutes. Save and load the project in PFM's own format to improve loading times in the future ("File -> Save..." / "File -> Open...").

Here's an example videoinformation on how to load aand maprender /your aSFM project:

animations

(The video is from an older video of Pragma /with PFM, butcheck theout basicthis approach is still the same.)article.

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