Tips

NOTE:

I am far from an expert in animation, and am still somewhat learning myself, this is mostly for people who are fresh and might not know what certain settings do or not know about some techniques.

These tips are assuming you know the bare minimum of SFM, how to add models, how to move bones, how to animate etc.

Lighting

When lighting, there are many tricks and settings you can apply to get a more visually pleasing result.

RADIUS

Radius at first glance may not look like it does anything, but if you go into the Movie Clip Editor (the one with the blue bar and shots) and wait a bit (depends on how good your pc is) you can see your lighting looks a bit different, now this may seem like it looks worse than normal, but what this does is add soft shadows.

Soft shadows help you achieve a nicer look and make shadows less dark and sharp, if you can use radius correctly you can achieve some pretty nice looking lighting, higher amounts of radius mean a higher amount of shadow softness, so play around with the slider to see what best suits your render.

WHEN RENDERING RADIUS, DO NOT RENDER AS A POSTER, RENDER IT AS AN IMAGE OR IT WILL MESS UP YOUR LIGHTING

No Radius

Radius

(Shine on the right is the model, not the light.)

THREE POINT LIGHTING

Three point lighting is a lighting technique used in many pieces of 3D animated media, as the name suggests, it contains 3 lights.

Light 1: Rim

Light 2: Main

Light 3: Fill

A rim light is a light that defines the subject of the render, it is typically placed behind the subject and creates a "rim" of light behind them, hence the name.

(Example of a rim light, made in blender but still stands in SFM)

The main light is what will mainly light up your subject, its typically placed at an angle above or below the subject whilst still facing it.

(Example of a main light, made in Blender but stands in SFM.)

The fill light is what fills the shadow of the main light, what the main light cannot reach its the job of the fill light to fill in the shadow to add a sense of colour depth.

(Example of a fill light, made in Blender but stands in SFM.)

Three point lighting can be integral to making nice looking renders, however you don't inherently have to follow it to make something look nice, and you can change it by adding a few extra lights if you do choose to follow it.

SHADOWDEPTHBIAS AND SHADOWATTEN

These sliders are incredibly useful to get nice looking lighting, they control the sharpness and darkness of shadows and can make your lights go from this

To this

In order to utilize these you want to turn the sliders DOWN, not up, turning them up will not give you this effect and will kind of make it look like it has no shadows.

COLOURS

This isn't inherently something you need to do, but following a certain colour pallete when lighting can make it far easier on the eyes (eg. cold colours (blue, purple, green etc.) and hot colours (red, orange)).

Alongside this, and this isn't needed and it's just something I like doing, instead of doing a raw white light, try and make it kind of blueish by turning down green and red slightly (around 1/3 down), it adds colour and can make a bland light go to being appealing to the eyes.

POSING

Posing is what makes your subject defining and unique-looking, posing can be a make or break like lighting, but this is significantly more integral to the render.

FINGERS

Something I see a lot of new artists do is not pose the fingers, which is okay if it's not really visible in the render, but if it is, leaving them stiff and unposed can make the render look unfinished and weird.

Something I like to do when posing fingers if they aren't really a big part of the renders is making them kind of have an "outstretched" to "inner" scale kind of thing.

A tip when posing fingers (or just moving multiple bones at once in general) is to right click on the "rotation orb" and hover over rotation mode then change it from world to local, this will make it so all the bones selected will rotate as if you had chosen them individually instead of moving locked to the world.

RIGGING

Top apply a rig, right click your model, hover over rig and select the rig you wish to apply.

(rig_biped_simple will NOT work on models with bip_ as their bone names.)

IK rigs can help a ton in posing and animation, they basically simulate actual movement of the bone (eg, moving the pelvis down will now make the legs bend, moving the foot will lift the entire leg, etc.) You won't need addons if you're using sfm built in models (HL and TF2), but for some workshop addons (FNAF, BATIM, etc.) you'll need an addon,

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=848269649

ANIMATION

SMOOTH SLIDER

The smooth slider will be your literal best friend as a beginner animator, what it does is what it's name suggests, smooths your animation, this is found in the motion editor (green bar) and can be used by selecting the bones you want to smooth and turning the smooth slider up (it won't actually go up or down but it will change the movements.)

Try to avoid relying on this slider too much though, as turning it all the way up will basically make the animation "too smooth" in a sense and make it incredibly slow and boring. (also because relying on this will basically make getting better pretty hard.)

JITTER SLIDER

The jitter slider, as the name suggests, makes thing jittery and shake, you can find it in the motion editor and it works the same as the smooth slider.

After turning it on you may be like "why would I ever want to use this?" and the answers are quite simple.

Camera movements

Shakier movements

Combining this slider with the smooth slider is integral for it to look good. Using this for camera movements is incredibly useful to add a sense of "action" to the camera movements instead of just being boring in and out side to side movements.

PHYSICS

Yea, physics

Most of you are probably FNaF animators, meaning you're animating a lot of animatronic movements, something I do, especially on animatronics is make the neck react to the spine and pelvis movements (etc, spine moves back, the neck moves forward and at the end of the spine movement it goes backward and balances out again, this is prominent in a lot of my animations.) When moving arms, you may want to make the lower arm follow the upper arms movements, and the hand follow the lower arms movements.

Again, this isn't required to make something good looking, this is just how I like to animate things.

CAMERA MOVEMENTS

Camera movements are a make or break for animations, if you can do them right, they can make your animation go from bland and boring to amazing, but if you do them poorly it'll end up making it look significantly worse.

Try and open a 2nd viewport (guide on how to later in article) and rotate the camera on the X-Axis to add a nice little touch to your movements, other than that camera movements are entirely up to what your animation style is and how you want to do them, I can't really provide any more tips for them.

CAMERA

Your camera is your pride and joy, its what frames your shots and is the fundamental building block to a render.

COMPOSITION

Composition is very, VERY important when making a render, I cannot give you any definitive tips since I myself struggle with it, but here's a link to a video explaining a technique I like to use a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsRy5EVggyg

Heres a workshop addon that adds the grid to your viewport.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=886589389

LETTERBOXING

Letterboxing is something that's typically not really talked about, and for decent reason, it's not really important and you can go without using it once and it won't really affect the quality of your renders.

What letterboxing is is basically those black bars you sometimes see in movies and games, it adds a cinematic feel to your shots and can help enhance it a bit.

ASPECT RATIOS

This is what defines your image's "shape".

A 16:9 image is what is mostly used in renders and animations, examples of this are the constraints "1920x1080" and "1280x720".

Example of 16:9

Changing image shape can help you achieve certain unique looks.

1:1 is another example of an aspect ratio, it's a pure square and can be used if you're trying to nail down a camera look or something.

Example of 1:1 aspect ratio.

Addon which adds aspect ratio overlays (must crop in order to actually make it look like the aspect ratio.)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2344126573

SFM BLOOM

Turn it down. Turn it all the way down. Please. For the love of god.

SFM bloom is awful, and something I'd recommend is to add the bloom in post, that's all I have to say.

DEPTH OF FIELD

This helps define subjects in your shot by blurring out the background.

You can use this but tuning the focaldistance slider and having the purple plane be clipping into your subject

Tuning the aperture slider will adjust how blurry the back will be, higher amounts mean more blur.

You can adjust the quality of the depth of field by right clicking, render settings and adjusting the amount of samples used next to the depth of field box (says Use Camera Settings by default.)

Higher samples means longer rendering and can cause issues during longer animations.

EDITING

I can't inherently give many tips for editing, however, if you want a free to use program for editing, try Krita, it's a drawing app but has many, MANY filters you can use. Utilizing colour balancing is also good to make your colours more defined and pronounced.

MISC

2 VIEWPORTS

Having 2 viewports is incredibly useful as it allows you to see how your render looks from camera view whilst you're doing things out of camera view, to open this, click on Windows at the top of SFM and click secondary viewport, then you can drag it around by dragging the "Secondary viewport" tab.

This is personally my setup, but preferences differ so you can put it where you like.

TROUBLESHOOTING

SFM is a buggy mess, theres no doubt about that, so troubleshooting is generally requiem when using it. If you have a problem, try and look it up on google, and if you cannot find a fix, try and find out if its a model or map causing the issue.

ANIMATIONS ABOVE 720P

If you've animated in SFM before, you may have noticed your animations cannot go above 720p, this isn't really integral however if you want that slight bit of quality you may want to change this and render in 1080p or even 4k (do not render in 4k it will take forever your pc will explode)

To do this, follow these steps

Right click on SFM on steam and click "Properties"

In the General tab, find the "Launch Options" category

In the text box, copy and paste this; "-sfm_resolution 1080 -w 1920 -h 1080" WITHOUT the quotations

For 4K rendering, replace 1920 with 3840, and 1080 with 2160 (this will literally murder your pc)

Now when rendering an animation, you can click on where it says 720p and it will say 1080p.

Source: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SFM/Rendering_at_1080p

I'll be updating this article as time goes on.