Is SFM even worth the time?

[Defenestration]

I think people with 3000 hours of SFM may still not make satisfactory animations.

The SFMs by Valve are the best indeed. Some other SFMs like Agent Gunn and the time traveling SFM seemed good as well.

But all of those are team based. Im not sure how many people worked on it and how long it took.

If I wanted to be a solo SFMer I want to make animations like from Valve. Otherwise I find SFMs just look sloppy from non professionals.

[Phobias]

I would say depends on how much heart you devote into it and how tallented you are at story make. I do agree that a number of SFMers on youtube don't put a whole lot of effort in their work. Such as action I look at characters fight and I'm like seriously I've always been off in my animating skills but even I could do better then a dozen SFMers. In the end it all comes down on years of practise.

[Zappy]

That depends on how fast you learn and how well you animate and other such stuff. Someone may make something after 100 hours of use that's better than something that someone made after 5000 hours of use. People grow in skill and experience at different rates, so you can't measure the worth in the amount of time being spent... nor in any other way.

[green]

Well, a lot of the Valve animations weren't a solo work. There were many people working months to put those animations together. Nevermind all the voice actors, writers, and various personnel that were involved.

The only way to get better, solo or not, is to practice. If you want to become a great SFM animator, then jump into it (if you haven't already). You're going to make some work that's probably cr*ppy, but that's all part of the process. Keep at it, and you'll see yourself improve.

[Kumquat [Velbud]]

It depends more on what you want to do with SFM. For example, I found it more fun to explore components of SFM's systems as well as exploring and recreating techniques from good game engines in SFM, which a lot of us do. Animating isn't the only thing you can do in SFM, and honestly, it is a lot more fun if you explore all facets of SFM. You dont have to understand everything, but at the very least, play around with stuff to replicate it from what you see. You may or may not get the desired effect, but results are fun nonetheless. :) Devote your time to failure, devote your time to what works.

[EmperorFaiz.wav]

First of all, you’re not going to be a pro in just few hours, days, months or even years. Animation in general is hard because there are so many criteria you meed to learn from the 12 principles of animation to cinematography in order to make a decent animation.

Note that use I the word “decent” instead of “professional”. That because making a real professional animation requires a team of professionals and alot of time refining everything. Even pros sometime slipped up unexpectedly but when there are more than one people working together, the issue can be minimized greatly. For a solo animator, the effort would quadruple or more and can be quite stressful and higher tendency to slip up when you least expected. So, you are most likely won’t get a real pro quality animation by doing solo.

So, you need to lower your standard first. Start slowly, master the basics and practice like these people above said. Focus more on making a decent animation that most people will enjoy. There are things can make your animation enjoyable even without the professional quality animation like storytelling, humor and more. You’ll get much better experience learning and have fun with it.

[Capt Fuzzy]

Originally posted by Defenestration:

If I wanted to be a solo SFMer I want to make animations like from Valve. Otherwise I find SFMs just look sloppy from non professionals.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret here.., the biggest majority (but not ALL, as Velbud pointed out) of the people that download SFM want to do the same thing. They see the Valve trailers, made with SFM, and they think to themselves, "Hey, I wanna do that too", but what they fail to realize is that those trailers were shot with a number of "industry" techniques that are outside of SFM as well. A good example of this is the 'Making of the CSGO trailer' video showing some of what went into making that trailer. If you've seen the video, then you know that there was a whole team involved, not just one or two people sitting at home in front of their PC wrangling with SFM, so of course they look awesome and very professional, they were made by professionals.
A single person could, theoretically, do this but it would take months of work and a very in-depth knowledge of SFM and how it works to pull off. If you think that you can just grab SFM and make something like that in a few hours or days, then you have the wrong idea right off the bat.

There are groups among the SFM community that do collaborations on videos and many of them produce very good results, but it still takes a while to do, even with several people working on it.

The biggest majority of what you see on the community hub are very short, fan-made videos and let's be frank here, the biggest majority of them are crappy. They aren't well-planned and are certainly not well-made and most of the authors even admit that it took so long to do that they just 'got bored' and cut corners just to get it out there. They were more interested in posting a video than making and posting a quality video.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.., SFM is NOT for the lazy.
You get out of it what you put in and if you don't have the 'intestinal fortitude' to put good quality work into it, you won't get good quality results, period.

[Kumquat [Velbud]]

I think a lot of people are nailing how hard it is. However, I would like to point out that the amount of work you put into it and our satisfaction with doing this work matters. Start ♥♥♥♥♥♥ like the rest of us, with attempts at making something good while not quite getting there, then build up on either the same project or something similar yet simple. Get to know the basics of good posing and how artists make such. In a long run, once you have done it for a while, then taken a break from it, you regain the patience for it later on and are able to handle it better. Introduce new comments and dont be surprised for getting frustrated.

[Capt Fuzzy]

Originally posted by Dover:

..gather a team together and start working on it.

Just a little 'amendment' to what Dover said, when you feel like you are ready to gather this team, make sure that you have some form of portfolio put together, because those that you attempt to recruit will more than likely want to see some examples of your work.
Also, don't be afraid to answer questions about the project itself, you don't have to give out every little detail, but be prepared with at least some basic answers to those questions.

[ZeaTrixe]

yes, its worth it.

all you need is practice, and time,
if you rush, it will look sloppy.
take your time,

also, look up tutorials.

and theres a save option, so if you need to take a break/sleep or do school work, you can just open it up and continue where you left off.