Commercial Use?

[Birchmark]

This is available for commercial use, isn't it?

Also, anyone using SFM in combination with other animation programs or video editors?

i.e. if I animate some in SFM and some in Blender or something like that, have people been succesful putting them together in a basic video editing program to create the final cartoon?

Anyone who has experience with both, any disadvantages of SFM over animating in something like Blender from scratch?

Sorry to be asking so many questions. I'm just starting with this particular program and I am seeing it as being part of a repertoire of programs I am going to have to use.

[R234]

Originally posted by Birchmark:

This is available for commercial use, isn't it?

You are indeed allowed to use an SFM-made movie for commercial purposes, provided said movie does not contain any copyrighted material, i.e. use TF2 stuff and you could get sued, but if you make your own characters, props, sounds, music, maps, etc., you're fine.

Originally posted by Birchmark:

Also, anyone using SFM in combination with other animation programs or video editors?

I edit my SFM videos in HitFilm Express.

Originally posted by Birchmark:

i.e. if I animate some in SFM and some in Blender or something like that, have people been succesful putting them together in a basic video editing program to create the final cartoon?

I dunno if someone has, but there's no reason why that wouldn't work. A video is a video, your editing program will not die just because they weren't rendered in the same program.

Originally posted by Birchmark:

Anyone who has experience with both, any disadvantages of SFM over animating in something like Blender from scratch?

SFM runs on a videogame engine, a very old 32-bit only one at that, so it's much more limited, both graphically and in terms of features. This is offset by SFM being ridiculously easy to use in comparison.

[Birchmark]

Thanks. It's about what I figured then. Interestingly, I only downloaded HitFilm Express yesterday as someone suggested it to be a good alternative to WMM for YouTube videos so you can stack video and don't have to record webcam directly over screen capture. This is why I needed to know about commercial use too as stuff will be going on my channel and I intend to monetise at least most of it. From what I already expected and from what you said, I'm thinking it will be a case of SFM and other programs working together in order to get out of it what I want to get out of it as I'm wanting stuff reasonably complex but easier for some scenes is good as I am one person and I don't want to take forever to make an episode of something. Thank you again for all of your answers.

[Birchmark]

I'm gonna have to have a good fiddle with it

[Zappy]

Originally posted by Birchmark:

Anyone who has experience with both, any disadvantages of SFM over animating in something like Blender from scratch?

While I don't have experience with Blender or anything else besides Source FilmMaker, Source FilmMaker is often considered to be one of the easiest tools to animate in, and it's easy to see why. There's the familiar keyframe-oriented animation mode called the "Graph Editor", which is pretty much like animation in any other animation-oriented program, and there's also the unique "Motion Editor", which allows you make changes on a time basis, rather than relying on keyframes. (See the official tutorials to learn more about this. Also see the official tutorials anyway.) However, be aware the keyframes can some times glitch out a little, although it's not exactly a common thing to happen.

With it running in a game engine, what you see when editing is even almost what you get when rendering (anti-aliasing, motion blur, depth of field, ambient occlusion, and lights don't get time to "sample" fully when in the two posing/animating modes), and you can even play it back in real-time (again stuff doesn't get to "sample" fully in this case), instead of having to wait a minute or something to render a single image, or pretty long to render a short clip, then make some changes and render again, as you (probably) would have to with Blender or other programs.
And in the non-posing/-animating mode, staying still in time on the same frame will sample out the anti-aliasing, motion blur, depth of field, ambient occlusion, and lights, letting you see what the end result would look like (except in very rare cases, where the exports might bug out in some way).
This makes it much easier to preview your work without having to render it out first. Speaking of Source FilmMaker running in a game engine which is sort of supposed to run in real-time, of course, it renders stuff insanely fast compared to other programs like Blender, but of course, you can't get quite as good results in Source FilmMaker, but still very good results.

But be aware that Source FilmMaker does not support dynamic reflections on models (only on flat surfaces (specifically water compiled into a map)). and lights compiled into the map will not receive shadows from models you spawn in Source FilmMaker, and you can only spawn up to 8 lights with shadows in Source FilmMaker. (You can, however, have lots of lights without shadows.) And models can't directly illuminate anything around them, requiring you to move lights around manually for this purpose.

Originally posted by Birchmark:

Also, anyone using SFM in combination with other animation programs or video editors?

If you can export animations into the Source Engine SMD or DMX formats, you can import them onto a model in Source FilmMaker, and obviously a video is a video, which you can of course stuff in most video editors. But if you mean render part of a video in one program and part of it in another program, please consider the very different look/style of the exports.

[R234]

Originally posted by Birchmark:

This is why I needed to know about commercial use too as stuff will be going on my channel and I intend to monetise at least most of it.

I'd just like to point out monetized Youtube video does not constitute commercial use. The nuance lies in the fact people don't have to pay to view your videos, instead the revenue comes from advertisement. Most companies have a different policy on this versus actual commercial use, such as Valve, who allow any and all of their assets to be used in monetized Youtube vids.
All those monetized TF2 SFM videos, such as mine, are 100% legal, provided they don't infringe on some other company's copyright.

[Birchmark]

Thanks for all of that guys. That's quite helpful. It's also good to know when I'm just in the "messing around" stage or if I want small assets alraedy in SFM that I can still monetise with that. I knew with games they often (but not always) separate out making money from their game other ways and youtube gaming videos and have a youtube policy, but I never knew in terms of the commerical use / non-commerical use where youtube stands unless they separate it out and I figured software was a bit different. I also knew if they didn't say you are generally okay to record gameplay videos, but I didn't really know where software stood, especially with the TF2 characters inside the program. I also make shirt designs so I also needed to know about commercial use or not for making merch for my own cartoon.

[R234]

Yeah, can't blame you for being a little confused by all this. Copyright laws can be quite murky, full of grey areas and whatnot.

As far as I can tell, merchandise does constitute commercial use, so if you use Valve IP contents in your videos you'd have to make sure the merch line itself doesn't show them. If I for instance started a shirt line, I'd have to make sure none of the established TF2 characters are printed on them, but my mascot might pass since the Female Scout is not technically a TF2 character, but an original, TF2-like character based on one of the existing one. Ayes Dyef might not take kindly to me using his character design, though. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure I could use my logo, since it's so obviously based on the Source logo...

Little disclaimer, I think I have a relatively good grasp on this stuff, but I'm no lawyer, so do take what I say with a grain of salt :P