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arriu

Is unreal engine the modern day equivalent of this? Is there something else that is more approachable?

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I think this is more comparable to something like Garry's Mod than a bare game engine.

Source Filmmaker and Unity are pretty approachable too

SFM is definitely the closest modern equivalent that comes to mind.

SFM is a real tool. People have made production quality stuff on it:

https://youtu.be/PU1fu6ErBoA

Listen, I have a real soft-spot for SFM and the people who use it. Valve made some really quality stuff with it in their hayday, and every once in a while I'll see a Saxxy winner that really knocks my socks off. Splicing stock footage with SFM-rendered content is not "production quality" though, and generally speaking their render pipeline has aged the worst of all. TF2 and SFM looked great in 2008, the highly stylized graphics did a good job to separate it from the pack. Nowadays it just looks corny though. Maybe it's because I've just seen so much SFM by now, but I think the bigger issue is that the textures and texture filtering just looks bad these days. If SFM wants to remain relevant, it's going to need a lot of work put into SFM2 to get it ready for a new era of animation.

I mean S2FM is already usable, just look at TheParryGod's stuff on YT.

It looks good, but as you can probably tell, you're only able to import Half Life: Alyx assets as of right now. Without Workshop assets like SFM1 had, it's going to be really hard for it to reach the critical mass it once enjoyed.

Fair enough. I’m hoping one day they just make some simple mo cap devices that let you control an in-game model and one person just uses a in-game camera like a FPS. Many of these game engines look good enough if you can just get a few people together to act out scenes and do camera work.

I'm working on something that intersects and have a private beta. If anyone is interested in this space, feel free to reach out. Right now I need another developer in addition to myself but will need some growth/product/ops help in the near future. Raise forthcoming.

Godot is pretty much drag and drop AND open source.

Godot is cool, but it's still an order of magnitude more complicated to make something than 3DMM, at least in the little bit of Godot that I've played with.

You can be "productive" with 3DMM in a matter of minutes, vs the few hours it takes for Godot. Of course, Godot is infinitely more capable than 3DMM, so it's sort of apples and oranges.

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