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Pragma Filmmaker Pragma Filmmaker Getting Started SFM to PFM Workflow Rendering Material Editor Actors and Components Lighting Expressions and Drivers External Render Tool Troubleshooting 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 For information on how to load and render your SFM animations with PFM, check out this article. SFM to PFM Workflow Here are some rough guidelines on how to import and render your SFM project with the Pragma Filmmaker: 1.) Get your SFM project ready In most cases your SFM project should just work, however there are a few restrictions to keep in mind: PFM does currently not support IK rigs. If your animation uses any IK rigs, you have to follow these steps in SFM first: 1.) Make sure all transforms for all actors are unlocked: 2.) Detach all rigs from all actors that have one: 3.) Save the session. The animations should now appear in PFM properly. Also keep in mind that some features (like motion blur) are not yet implemented in PFM and will not work. 2.) Launch PFM and import the Project You can launch PFM by launching Pragma, clicking "New Game" and changing the game mode to "Filmmaker". PFM currently doesn't change the map when importing a SFM session, so you will have to select the map in the "New Game" menu before clicking "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. Once 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 (Pragma may appear frozen during this time). After the project has been imported, you can save it in PFM's internal format (".pfm"), which can be loaded a lot faster. If your SFM session file is located in one of the default sub-directories in "steam/steamapps/common/SourceFilmmaker/game/", your SFM session file should be listed in the import file explorer automatically. If the file is located in a custom location (e.g. "SourceFilmmaker/game/custom/elements/"), you will have to open "Pragma/cfg/mounted_games.txt", locate the "sfm" entry and add your path to the "game_paths" list in the same format as the existing ones. If this doesn't work, you can just copy the session file to one of the default sub-directories (e.g. "SourceFilmmaker/game/usermod/elements/"). Here's an example video on how to load a map / a project: (The video is from an older video of Pragma / PFM, but the basic approach is still the same.) For information on how to render your animation with Pragma, check out this article. Rendering To render your scene, switch to the "Cycles-Renderer" tab above the viewport and you should see a window similar to this one (but with a black viewport): This is where you can render your scene with the Cycles path-tracing rendering engine. This is the same renderer used by Blender to create highly realistic images. Cycles is not a real-time renderer, which means rendering an image takes time. The amount of time required, depends on the complexity of the scene, your hardware, the specified sample count and various other factors, and can take anything between several seconds and minutes. If you want to get a quick preview render, click the "Render Preview" button. This will render an image with a very low sample count and low resolution, which will give you a rough idea of what the final render will look like. To render your final image(s), press the "Render Image(s)" button. When rendering an image for a new project or a new map for the first time, Pragma may appear frozen for a few minutes, this is because some additional asset conversions are required for the Cycles-renderer. Subsequent renders should not take as long. The render options to the right can be used to change the resolution of your render, sample count, number of frames, etc. You can leave most of these options on their defaults in most cases, but here are some of the more important options: Device Type: You can render with either your CPU or your GPU. This option only affects rendering speed, the end-result is the same. If you have a modern GPU, you may want to consider switching to GPU rendering. Samples per Pixel: The higher the sample count, the higher quality your render will be, at the cost of rendering time. If you notice weird discolorations in your final render, or if you're using advanced render features (like subsurface scattering), you'll likely have to increase this value to get good results. Resolution: The resolution of the render. You can choose between the presets, or hold the alt-key and click into the field to enter manual values (e.g. "1000x1200"). Higher resolutions will result in longer rendering times. Sky override: This defines the background sky image if you're rendering an outdoor scene (or an indoor scene with windows). The choice of sky is important and can have a tremendous impact on your scene, choose it carefully! Both equirectangular HDR and PNG images are supported, but it's important that the images have a 16-bit color depth (HDR colors). You can also leave this field empty to use the map's skybox for the sky instead. Sky Strength: The intensity of the light emitted by the sky image. Max transparency bounces: This field is usually not important unless you have a lot of overlapping transparent objects in your scene. If you notice black spots around transparent objects, try increasing this value. Light intensity factor: Controls the global light intensity of the scene (excluding lighting caused by the sky). Number of frames to render: If you intend to render an image sequence, set this value to the number of frames you wish to render. Output Format: The image format that the frames will be saved as once rendering is complete. If set to HDR, no tone-mapping will be applied and the image will be saved with the original 16-bit colors. Enable camera frustum culling: If enabled, objects that are outside of the visible area of the camera are not included in the render. This can improve rendering times, but may also cause incorrect lighting in some scenes (especially indoor scenes). Tone mapping: The tone-mapping algorithm to use to transform the HDR colors to sRGB space. Some tone-mappers have additional parameters to tweak the result. Once rendering is complete, the image will automatically get saved to your harddrive. You can press the "Open Output Folder" to navigate to it in the system explorer. In general it is not recommended to render a large sequence of images or images with a large sample count / high resolution directly in Pragma, but to use the external render tool instead. Please see that section for details. VR / 360 Scenes To render VR or 360 images, change the "Camera type" to "Panorama". This opens two new render options: Panorama Range: The horizontal view range in degrees for your scene. The vertical range is always 180 degrees. Stereo: Enable this to render images for VR. This will render the image twice, once for the left eye and once for the right, which will also double rendering times. Material Editor The material editor allows you to change the material properties used to render your models, which can drastically change the way they look in the final render. There are two ways to access it: Method #1 1. Open the "Model Catalog" from the "Windows" menu and find the model of which you want to edit a material. 2. Right-click the icon. 1. If you see "Import asset" in the list, click that option. This means it's an external asset, which needs to be converted to Pragma first. 2. If you see "Load" in the list, click that option. This means the asset hasn't been loaded yet. 3. Right-click the icon again and select "Edit Material" from the list.
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