Switching From SFM to Blender

I’m not sure if I mentioned this in my past posts, but I feel like I should share this with everyone. The goal I’m striving for by the end of the year is an almost complete switch to doing Blender animations. I wanted to make this post explaining why I plan on switch from SFM after using the tool for almost five years. 

SFM has been a great starting tool, and I still recommend those who want to get into animating to use the program. However, there are A LOT of issues with SFM that I do not recommend for animators who want to get serious. The big issues for me are the graph editor, limited shading options, and the lack of support from Valve.

Almost every animation program has a graph editor, or a tool that handles the keyframes and curves for an animation. While SFM has one like a standard animation programs, it’s extremely buggy. Sometimes SFM would overshoot curves for no rhyme or reason, undershoot curves and even cause some curves to straight up DISAPPEAR. I’ve been feeling frustrated animating in SFM since I feel like I have no complete control over my animation at times even with the use of its animation correction tools. Since I’ve been animating in Blender, I feel like I have more control over my animations since it has tools to allow more precise and subtle movements. Hell, there are some animations I’ve worked on that feels more natural than my SFM animations. 

Another issue for me is the limited shading option. For years, I noticed that people complained that I should toon shade my anime parodies. Unfortunately, SFM does not have a built-in toon shader. I’ve seen some SFMers use toon shading for posters, and very short animations, but most of the time they’re done by modifying the fuck out of the model, making the face shadeless, or in compositing. While there are times, I got lucky with a good toon shaded model, most of the time the models ported in SFM looks terrible with SFM’s regular lighting. And since I work on long animations, the amount of compositing would be nightmarish.

Finally, I just don’t like the fact Valve basically abandoned the software. The last big update for SFM was back in 2015.2015. Sure, the community has been adding new tools to SFM, but some of these tools make SFM unstable. For example, in the Gohanverse animation, Gohan’s hair was animated using body groups. However, the addon used to animate his hair would sometimes bug out and change his hair at the wrong time. FFS, Valve held the 2017 Saxxy’s in 2018 and have made no mention about when is the next one. Blender on the other hand has been updated several times and the developers hold livestreams discussing major updates.

I want to state that despite me making the switch to Blender, this is not going to be an easy task. Blender has a steeper learning curve than SFM. Hell, I’ve been trying to teach myself Blender since August of last year. It wasn’t until recently that I started to understand the UI and the ability to quickly select my bones using the Bone Selector addon I commissioned. My friend also mentioned that some people would get upset with me switching to Blender. I highly doubt that, but hey, people can be weird at times.

Like I said before, this is something I would like to accomplish by the end of this year. I want to make a gradual shift towards Blender animations. I plan on releasing the Neptunia and JoJo Blender animations this summer, then go into high gear with the Blender animations this fall. The only animations that will still be animated in SFM is Gohanverse Season 1. Switching animation programs mid-way through the series would take too much time and it would cause a whiplash for people watching the series. However, I do know that when I work on Season 2, it will be done in Blender like everything else. I wanted to open and mention this to you guys since you guys have been supporting me and deserve to know. Thanks for reading guys.