Originally posted by Hate Chills:

- I made the map in Gmod hammer. - the lighting works but none of my furniture or wall textures load. -

Garry's Mod can automatically load assets from other installed Source Engine games, while Source Filmmaker can't. If you used any assets not from Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress 2 (e.g. Counter-Strike: Source or even Garry's Mod itself), or any post-2014 Team Fortress 2 assets, then you'll have to...


Now reboot Source Filmmaker, and you should be able to use assets from the game(/add-on), letting the map load correctly.

Originally posted by Zappy:

Originally posted by Hate Chills:

- I made the map in Gmod hammer. - the lighting works but none of my furniture or wall textures load. -

Garry's Mod can automatically load assets from other installed Source Engine games, while Source Filmmaker can't. If you used any assets not from Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress 2 (e.g. Counter-Strike: Source or even Garry's Mod itself), or any post-2014 Team Fortress 2 assets, then you'll have to...

- Create a new folder* in -/SourceFilmmaker/game/ called whatever you'd like (e.g. "css" is common for Counter-Strike: Source).
- Within the folder that you just made, create folders called "maps", "materials", "models", "particles", and "sound".
- Use GCFScape to extract the "materials", "models", "particles", and "sound" folders from the game in question's VPKs (or copy them from the add-on in question), and merge them with the folders that you just made.
- Right-click Source Filmmaker in your Steam library, choose "Launch" to open a pop-up menu, select "Launch SDK" and launch it, click "Edit Search Paths For Selected Mod", and enable the name that you used for the first folder (e.g. "css").

Now reboot Source Filmmaker, and you should be able to use assets from the game(/add-on), letting the map load correctly.

* You shouldn't put custom assets into Source Filmmaker's default search paths, especially not "usermod" as it's an important folder. If something goes wrong, it can sometimes require you to reinstall Source Filmmaker, and problems can happen even if you do everything correctly (e.g. crashing due to indexing too many assets).

I actually put one sound to the usermod, is it dangerous?

Basically what he's saying is, whenever you create a custom map, all the custom assets of that map (sounds, models, textures, etc..) must be compiled and exported all together to SFM. Or things will be missing. It's a better practice using custom folders rather than "\usermod".

Originally posted by MarkoPASGT:

I actually put one sound to the usermod, is it dangerous?

No - but if you keep doing that, then yes.


You can easily disable any search paths that you're not using. This can speed up the model and sound browsers when indexing/finding assets, and help prevent Source Filmmaker from crashing due to indexing too many assets.

But if everything is in a single search path, then disabling it would prevent you from using all assets in it, making that a non-option if you want to use anything in it - and if that single search path has enough assets to crash Source Filmmaker on its own, then that's a problem.
The only way to fix that is to move files out of the "single big" search path and into "multiple smaller" search paths - which gets tedious if you have thousands of folders to organise, while also keeping their relative file paths intact in the new search paths, especially if they're intermingled with any default files that you want to keep in the original search path.


Additionally, in case of file conflicts, you can easily reorder search paths to change which one takes priority. If you have conflicting assets in the same search path, then you can't reorder it amongst itself - and if you have conflicting assets in "usermod" in particular, then there's basically no way to reorder it.
That becomes a problem if you e.g. end up with outdated/customised Team Fortress 2 models in "usermod", as then you can't just give it lower priority than "tf" and "tf_movies".