[SFM] Meet The Heavy-Engineer-Soldier | Ultrawide Remastered

Well, first of all, I apologize for sharing a re-render with you (again) instead of an original animation. I realize I've done this re-render content countless times, but this will be the last time (a promise). I'm relearning Blender and SFM in the background. ---- Backstory: A while ago, while looking through my old phone, I noticed a detailed note from 2022, and it was about a high-quality re-render of Meet the Heavy. The reason I wrote the note was my old laptop. My old laptop was a toaster, so naturally, SFM didn't work well, and the render quality of the animations I'd made before this was very poor. So, I wanted to do this when I got a new computer. Of course, I got a new computer in 2023, but I forgot about that and made a Game Benchmark instead, lol. Since these three videos are pre-made DMX files provided by Valve, I mostly just fixed some minor bugs (a few broken NPCs and sentries) and increased the FOV of the cameras; The cameras in Meet The Soldier were incredibly challenging for a reason I didn't understand, I had to duplicate the camera in every scene. After that, all that was left was rendering, and since the computer would handle that, all I had to do was wait. I decided to do the rendering when I wasn't at the computer, and in July 2023, I prepared my DMX files. In September 2024, while verifying my SFM files, I didn't rename the draft files, so Steam mistook them for corrupt files and deleted them, losing my work! I didn't realize the files had been deleted before I decision to add SSAO to files. I was going to render, but I kept postponing the rendering process, so much so that it was almost a year late. I had to redo everything I'd done before, and more. The video almost extending to January 2026 but I had completely finished the video. ---- Technical Details: I was wrong to think that I could just press the render button and enjoy myself, SFM has a really buggy rendering system. On average, I took 24MB of storage and 25 seconds of rendering time per frame. That's means I used 220+ hours(with FAILED RENDERS) and 750+ GB of storage. Of course, since I didn't have a high-capacity HDD, I had to constantly render at medium quality. This resulted in me being unable to compensate for my occasional rendering errors. After rendering all the Meet The scenes with SFM, firstly I combined the Image Sequences in Blender and after that, I re-combined the videos with Shotcut. Since my GPU didn't have the AV1 codec, AMF_HEVC made more sense. But even HEVC rendering took a very long time, despite using the graphics card. The video might not have the same tonal map and motion levels, a different DoF setting might have been used, or SSOA might not have been adjusted properly. Setting the DoF to 1024 pushed the RX 6600 to its limits, significantly increasing render times. After reading some guides, I saw that 1024 was only recommended for posters, so 256 DoF/ 128 Motion Blur was a better option. -4K (Ultrawide) wasn't possible because SFM's maximum video rendering resolution is 4K at 16:9, and I tested 21:9 4K with a triple camera. However, because it wasn't stable, I cropped the "16:9 4K" to "2K at 21:9":   / you_can_make_a_219_scale_animation_using_a...     / i_tried_to_make_219_animation   This FPS value is real; no AI was used. I was initially considering setting the FPS to 360 FPS, but since the term "360 degrees" is numerically similar, I then lowered it to 144 FPS. However, when it became similar to 1440p resolution, I didn't like it. So, I lowered it to 120 FPS (five times the standard animation FPS) and also reduced the render time. ...maybe one day YouTube will start supporting 120 FPS, at least for the gaming industry. The video is rendered with 68 Mbps, *with YouTube's 4K60 video bitrate limits: https://support.google.com/youtube/an... I couldn't do 3D because there's no option to turn off 3D in the YouTube mobile app. Regarding VR (180-360 degrees), creating VR videos in SFM is difficult, and that's already been done; I'll add it to my recommended videos. The Outline option has just been disabled because AMD's own way of doing things makes the lines look too thick:   / for_those_who_dont_know_on_amd_gpus_the_ou...   An experienced SFM animator warned me several times about the Shutter Speed, but I had no idea what setting he was talking about. I tried using the lowest stable limit [0.01666] for this render, but how compatible it would be with 120 FPS is debatable: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1840/d... SFM start-up codes are didn't worked well: " -sfm_shadowmapres 16384 +mat_forceaniso 16 -reflectiontexturesize 1024 +mat_envmapsize 256" --- 00:00 Meet the Heavy 01:12 Meet the Engineer 02:24 Meet the Soldier 03:41 Meet the Source Filmmaker --- #tf2 #sfm #tf2edit