It's not that the current offerings have been terrible, far from it, but ever since Valve released the Source Film-maker there's been the quiet expectation that it would really start to shine once professional animators, and not just dedicated fans, got hold of it.
Well, here's what it looks like when a professional gets their hands on it.
This lengthy short, detailing the daily problems faced by an Engineer, is the work of James McVinnie, a cinematic designer at BioWare. If you think the animation looks a little better than what we're used to seeing with these clips, that's because he used two Kinects to grab motion-capture data.
Sure, it took him 130 hours, but the fact something this impressive can now come from just one man...