To coincide with the release of Valve’s latest Team Fortress 2 short “Meet the Pyro,” the company has released a beta of Source Filmmaker (SFM). Leveraging Valve’s own in-house technology, the tool allows anyone to create animated films with relative ease. There’s no need for powerful rendering farms, everything can be done on a modern gaming PC.

In fact, the Source Filmmaker was used to create all of Valve’s marketing ads as well as the TF2 shorts. All in-game assets can be used directly for film making purposes. This further streamlines the workflow process, since there’s no need maintain separate asset trees.

“The goal of the SFM was to develop a story telling tool that allowed us to create computer animated movies more efficiently, and with greater creative freedom,” said Valve designer Bay Raitt. He added, “Over the past five years, we’ve produced more than 50 animated shorts with the SFM. The Source Filmmaker will allow our community to create their own movies in Team Fortress 2 and in their own Source SDK-created mods.”

The fact that Valve is putting their own tools out there for anyone to use is incredibly cool, we can’t wait to see what folks do with this. For an overview of what SFM offers, check out the video below. Hit up Valve’s site to sign up for the closed beta.

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