SPeditor

SPeditor — a poster studio inside Garry's Mod

Version a0.5 (alpha)

SPeditor turns Garry's Mod into a small studio for posters and still scenes. It brings the working habits of Source Filmmaker — dockable windows, an Animation Set Editor, two viewports, a free work camera — to any map.

New in a0.5

• Video at 60 fps (any rate up to 120) from a 24 fps animation — the frames in between are posed between the keys, as in SFM. Render only chosen frames.
• Long animations: up to an hour, the timeline zooms with Ctrl + wheel.
• SAeditor: a curve editor, face keys (Shift+K), procedural breathing and blinking, Stop Motion Helper import and export, sound fades.
• Posing: plane handles on the Move gizmo, IK that keeps the feet planted, lock a hand to the other hand, click the body to pick a bone, models without physics (SFM ports) can be posed.
• Take objects from the map: Ragdoll Mover poses, Advanced / Easy Bonemerge, Advanced Light Entities, Soft Lamps.
• Interface settings: accent colour, font, rounded windows; themes Vanilla UI and GMod XP; notification styles, animations and sound sets.
• Model browser: Addons and Games. Help → Where are my files. Imported animations no longer stretch the neck.

Everything with screenshots: wiki → What's new.

Wiki, PDF and GitHub

• SPeditor Wiki — every window, tool and hotkey, with screenshots (EN / RU)
• PDF guide: English · Русский
• GitHub — source code (MIT), bug reports in Issues

How to open it

• C menu → the SPeditor icon
• Q menu → SPeditor tab → Toggle editor
• or the console command speditor_toggle (bind it: bind f6 speditor_toggle)

On a server the editor is for admins by default (speditor_access admin | superadmin | all).

Your first poster in five steps

[olist] [*]Press + in the Animation Set Editor and pick a model. [*]Move (1), rotate (2) or scale (4) it, or pose single bones. [*]Add a camera and lights from the same + menu. [*]Open Render, choose the camera, the frame aspect and the size. [*]Press Render. The file appears in garrysmod/data/speditor/renders. [/olist]

What it can do

• SFM-like workspace: windows dock, tabs drag out, layouts are saved, any window can be pinned on top.
• Two viewports with an aspect gate and composition guides.
• Cameras: a free work camera and scene cameras you can look through.
• Posing: a gizmo for objects and every bone, inverse kinematics, bone locks, pose copy and paste.
• Faces: flexes, eye target, skins and bodygroups.
• Object properties: colour, opacity, texture replacement, shadow on or off, stretching along an axis.
• Attaching: a weapon in a hand, a hat on a head; clothing that bends with the body.
• Lights: point and spot lights with a soft edge, penumbra, glow and a visible beam; 19 ready-made light kinds, light masks, falloff, a three-point rig.
• Effects: explosions, fire, smoke, blood, sparks from the game and Workshop addons, stopped at any moment.
• Camera effects: depth of field, exposure, fisheye, vignette, HDR, bloom and custom shaders.
• Workshop shaders: Engine frame mode brings addon shaders into the picture (GShader Library too).
• Render to PNG or JPEG up to 3840 px: smoothing, depth of field, live preview.
• Scenes and poses, autosave, undo and redo.
• Mods (guide in Windows → Mods), notifications, interface themes, English and Russian.

SAeditor: animation

SAeditor is a mod, not a separate window: it adds a Timeline tab to the editor's bottom window. [olist] [*]Select an object, put the playhead on a frame and press K — a key appears. A key remembers everything: position, pose, face, light, camera, the moment of an effect. [*]Move the playhead, change the scene, press K again. The motion between keys is calculated for you. With Auto key every edit sets a key. [*]A character can get a ready-made animation — walking, gestures, dances: right-click it → Animation → Import model animation. [*]Sounds: Animation → Add a sound or a voice line. [*]Space plays it. The Render window then offers "whole animation / current frame" and a video format. [/olist] The animation is saved together with the scene. Video is written as an AVI file (renders/<name>.avi.dat — the game gives addons no other extension, remove ".dat") or as JPEG / PNG frames.

Main hotkeys

• LMB select · RMB object menu · RMB + WASD fly · Alt + LMB orbit · Wheel zoom
• 1 / 2 / 4 move, rotate, scale · 3 axes · I inverse kinematics
• F focus · V camera view · B skeleton · Del delete
• Ctrl + Z / Y undo, redo · Ctrl + D duplicate · Ctrl + C / V pose
• SAeditor: Space play · K key · Shift + K face key · , / . previous, next frame · Home / End first, last frame

Good to know

• Only spot lights cast shadows; each shadow-casting light costs FPS.
• The game cannot write MP4: SAeditor writes AVI or frames that ffmpeg turns into MP4.
• Render animations with the game window focused.