Hi... it's been a hot minute since I've logged in on here. I would like to apologize for my absence, this year has been, not the best for me to be blunt. There has been a lot going on when it comes to a large portion of things, some related to creating art, some not.
First things first I want to address, yes I'm still making SFM renders, that is one of the main things I like to do. I just haven't been posting them on here. Reasons being I end up forgetting to or just procrastinate on it until I remember. However recently there has been an event that has basically shaken up the flow of render creation, and its a big elephant in the room. In early February, numerous nintendo addon were starting to get taken down from the Garry's Mod workshop on steam... this made me concern with the state of addons on the workshop and I feared for the worst. We all believed this was a rouge troll sending out fake DMCAs to steam workshop creators. A movement began to save as many of the taken down addons as we could before they were lost for good. We also heard rumors that there was DMCAs being sent to workshop creators on the L4D2, TF2, Tower Unite, and SFM workshops as well although the ones on TU and SFM were completely verified. Then on April 24, 2024, 4-24-24, a date from this moment I will always infamously remember, the garry's mod team made a statement:
Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down. This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.
Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo's content and what they allow and don't allow is up to them. They don't want you playing with that stuff in Garry's Mod - that's their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can.
This is an ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through. If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot.
This broke the workshops for SFM, Gmod, and tf2... A full fledge flame war raged through out the workshop with the main archive discussion turning into a place where people were attacking one another. There was vulgar language being slinged at both Nintendo, Garry, Facepunch, Steam, and numerous trolls using the chaos to get a hard on. The best that we was to archive whatever we could, for me to be honest it wasn't easy considering what Facepunch was doing behind the scenes. For example I was on the Chromium branch as when I played with friends on gmod we use it to watch videos with the media player addon... well facepunch was experimenting with moving all workshops to cache as they have done officially recently, but at the time I went into the addons folder (and this was on the same 4-24-24 day btw) and was horrified that all the addons were gone... it was completely empty, not to mention it felt like they had different ID numbers so i couldn't find the taken down addons (The official change is fine thought cause this time i know the IDs match up), and this was a time that I didn't know how to handle Legacy bin folders so I couldn't use the other method of getting them... I had to delete all the gmas in the cache and reinstall Gmod back on the official branch. I lost 13 addons in the process. (Thankfully most of them were RTB's pokemon packs which were backed up prior but still fuck.)
Everything has calmed since then but the damage has been done. Its taken a lot out of me, everyday since then I've been checking every day religiously for any addon that I have subbed to if they have been taken down... and I have gotten into a hang of it. Atleast for Garry's Mod... SFM however is odd... unlike garry's mod there is no third party software currently that I know of that allows for finding what addons were taken down and archiving them... well there was one but that tool doesn't work anymore, and the other method for getting the unlisted addons is too tech heavy. So there isn't much I can do... Not to mention that "The Pokemon Company" is now sending DMCA's to people on both Gmod and SFM, so Archiving is more important than ever. There is a Discord server that helps with archiving addons... but only to a certain extent. I'm even contemplating about archiving some on my own discord...
All this chaos has messed with the flow of output and I'm more worried now than ever about being able to still use some item from the workshop for my art. The ones you know like the Smash Ultimate Charizard and the one I use for
the Smash Ultimate Mewtwo were unlisted and privated but not taken down, leaving my subscriptions in a very awkward position. Needless to say I have no choice but to archive everything that i had subbed that was taken down. The point is this event as affected me a lot this year, and I'm still having to deal with it.
Secondly I've been think about making my own website and its still is a WIP, eventually I want to make it a place where I can exclusively post my art and other projects I have in mind. And for a bit of time I was working on it, But ended up procrastinating a bit... and I need to rethink the design a bit. There is a lot of things of HTML I need to figure out before I fully see what the final product will be.
Thirdly I was also planning to get a new PC this year around June but because of how hectic the second half of spring was with... you know what, and the fact that work was starting to slow down as we got further into summer, I ended up in a bit of a financial situation where I wasn't using my money wisely. The plan was to get the New PC so that i could not only play games that REQUIRED an SSD to play along with a graphics card that was better than a GTX 1060 6GB, but I was also going to use it to learn blender... and I mean LEARN BLENDER... The most I can get out of blender with right now is video editing... and that is it... I want to make Renders with it at some point, You can only have so many wardrobe malfunctions in SFM knowing that it doesn't happen at all in blender. I NEED to learn it, I need to learn Hammer too but SFM isn't supported with Hammer ++ yet and you see the problem. And I need to upgrade to a new PC soon, Windows 10 is going to lose support in October of 2025, I don't have much time left I need to start regaining my money as quickly as possible which meaning trying to get as much work as I can meaning I'm going to be exhausted by the time i get home.
I do want to try to post every now and then on here. I do have a lot of art I have made over the year and I will be posting some of it... Just know that I'm more active on discord than on here. When I finish an art piece I usually post it there first. I'll see if I'm free tomorrow to post some stuff as I need this day to relax. Please know I haven't fully forgotten about this site. Things are just very weird for me right now.
I suppose you are now wondering who the hell I am, and what do I have to say regarding all the topics you've talked about. That said, let's start.
I'm Coercer, and I've been into animation since 2022. I pretty much started like you, watching a few SFM tutorials, and like that, the wheel started spinning.
I've done my fair share of request videos between 2022 and 2023, but, at one point, I said... Let's see what this blender thing is! And, lemme tell you, it is not THAT hard to get into, especially if you use SFM before. It can be overwhelming, but, in fact, you don't ever use 90% the icons you see there to make animations like mine.
I recomend you to step away from SFM, the earlier, the better. It might be a good way to get started into 3D animation, but, it was already starting to get obsolete back in 2021-2022, so, now it's more like ancient. Any pro SFM had over blender is already long gone. To top it out, pre-made models are also quite accessible to blender. At first, it might look like the opposite, but, you only need to look into the right places to find everything you need, like in SFM. And normally, even better models.
This leads me to the main point I want to discuss with you: I've had an idea in the back of my head for a long time now, and it is to make a comprehesive Blender tutorial, covering the basics neccessary to get into 3D animation, the SFM way. Drop out anything related to modeling, simulations, etc... to go straight to the point. Many, many parts of the Blender tutorials are completely unneccesary if you want to use it as a substitute of SFM. And, not only that, but, with the passing of time, you can get deeper and depper into it once you feel comfortable with what you do. That's how I've gotten to the point I'm now in blender, and improving. It takes WAY shorter than people say, or, at least, it is my impression. That's why I want to try to make a tutorial from my point of view, in order to see if it is effective.
That said, seeing you have a PC and the will to learn, I can try to start something off if you're interested, and see where does this go. If the results are satisfactory, I can start publishing it. I like to do pokémon-centered content, so we are on the same accord there too.
Another important topic I want to bring up - since you seem affected by it, it's the hardware. I have a 8GB gig RAM computer, and NO graphic card (Other than the weak integrated one). I can assure you, using the correct renderers in Blender, you won't need to buy any GPU to do the heavy lifting - a measly modern i3 processor will bring rendering speed to an acceptable level for SFM-Like videos. Win10 and almost any Linux distro can run modern versions of blender, so don't really wreck your head around that, as it isn't neccessary either. Again, if you are interested in this, I can guide you to the best choice for you.
Lastly, there is *one* case where you won't have enough even with an high-end GPU: Realistic-looking renders. But even in that case, I'd tell you to rely on MUCH cheaper options than buying a new PC: Cloud computing. This ISN'T possible with SFM, but it is with Blender. Third time again, if you agree to let me start teaching you, I will cover this topic too.
That's a bit all, if you have any doubt, feel free to PM me.
Cheers.
- Coercer1730
Hello there. I suppose you are now wondering who the hell I am, and what do I have to say regarding
