Valve have just announced that the Source Filmmaker is now in full-on open beta, available “for free, to everyone“. Yes, that means absolutely everyone with a Steam account. It can be downloaded from the Steam Store, here. It’s a fairly bulky program, though, so make sure you have a fair bit of free space on your hard-drive before you download and install it.

The SFM itself has received a brand new update, which includes session files for “Meet the Engineer”, the third TF2 Meet the Team short film. This means that the onslaught of “Meet the Heavy” parodies is about to come to an end, and an even greater influx of “Meet the Engineer” variations are about to flood the Internet. May God have mercy on our souls.

The Source Filmmaker is a cinematic story-telling tool based in the Source engine, originally developed by Valve in 2005. It is now used all of their animated short films and promotional videos. It’s unbelievably versatile, fairly simple, and it synthesizes the entire production pipeline of a modern animation studio, into one simple program, that can be used and operated by any gaming PC. Really, what’s not to like?

In addition, Valve have opened a new section of the Steam Community devoted entirely to the Source Filmmaker. There, you can share, view, discuss, and rate videos made using the SFM. There are already over 870 videos in this Filmmaker community, and it doesn’t show signs of stopping. So why not join in?