SFM Models and animations into Unity

A couple of months ago a friend of mine had a thought. Source Film-maker is a tool which is widely used by content creators to create animatons and movies. There are a lot of complaints that it is finicky and awkward to use, but it continues to be popular. He wondered why, such a tool isn't used to make animations to import them into Unity or another game engine. So I decided to provide him an answer.

It turns out, there isn't much of a reason, as the process is quite straightforward. A SFM model can be ported into Blender using a third party add on and then converted using blender into an FBX file. The same thing can be done with a SFM animation as demonstrated by a short video that I made for him.

It turns out that the animation moving around was an issue with Unity physics reading the animation movements into its physics engine. Turning that off means that the animation will play normally.

If one wanted, they could quite easily apply this to a SFM model and use unity scripts to bind the model to the animation data points and quite easily have an animated character, providing one can actually animate in Source Film maker that is.

A short fun project, but one which I found quite an intriguing problem which through the use of third party tools, is quite solvable.