Valve have opened the beta for their in-house cinematic tool, the Source Filmmaker. Below is a video taking us through its various features, but those I’m most interested in are the abilities to not only pause and reframe shots in realtime, but also pose and and animate characters on the fly.
This is one of the new directions I’ve been anticipating we take as an industry as a whole as we do away with the idea of creating animations and rigs in content creation packages such as Maya and 3DS Max and animate directly in the engine, removing both the export step and more importantly the disconnect between what you make in the DCC and later see in the game with the correct camera, rigging, and all the motions blending together – allowing us to truly work in a WYSIWYG environment.