Boris FX Silhouette 2023 – Upgrade

Visual Effects & Compositing

The industry’s leading roto and paint tool is now packed with major features for compositing. Silhouette delivers 400+ nodes including premier plugins Sapphire, Mocha Pro, and Particle Illusion wrapped in one integrated node-based package. Silhouette has been integral to Hollywood’s biggest titles for over fifteen years and recently made its mark on Dune, Spiderman: No Way Home, Free Guy, and The Mandalorian. Designed by visual effects artists, Silhouette has been recognized with prestigious Academy and Emmy technical awards and is a member of the Netflix Production Technology Alliance.

New Effects

• AI / ML: Generative AI and machine learning tools debut in the Stability and Denoiser ML nodes.
• Grain Management Tools: Denoiser ML, Regrain, and Sapphire UltraGrain nodes deliver cinematic realism to projects.
• Primatte: The Academy Award-nominated technology makes it easy to key and composite green/blue screen footage with a GPU-accelerated algorithm and 3D Preview display.
• Expressions: Create complex animations & link parameters, perform math functions, and use variables without writing code.
• Nodes: Atmospheric Glow and Curves.
• Presets: Beauty Studio, Camera Shake, Chromatic Aberration, Day for Night, Develop, Film Glow, Grunge, Light Leaks, Prism, Rays, Smear Blur, Sunset, Two Strip, Vignette, and X-Ray.

Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is a pioneering, deep-learning text-to-image model primarily used to generate detailed images based on text descriptions.

The new Stability node integrates Stable Diffusion models directly in Silhouette. Inpaint, outpaint, or generate images from scratch using text prompts!

Packed with Effects Tools

New versions of Sapphire, Mocha Pro, Particle Illusion, and select Continuum nodes.

• Sapphire: Award-winning effects with 270+ nodes and thousands of presets. Featuring the best lighting effects, lens flares, and creative image processing filters.
• Mocha Pro: Featuring PowerMesh, Remove, and Stabilize. Data ports and node actions integrate Mocha Pro with other nodes.
• Particle Illusion: Create realistic particle simulations with 3D emitters, fluid dynamics, and a massive preset library. Add useful environmental elements such as snow, smoke, and fire — all within Silhouette.
• Continuum: Atmospheric Glow, Magic Sharp, Beauty Studio, Light Leaks, Video Glitch, Film Glow, and many blur filters.

Grain Management Nodes

Three powerful nodes join Silhouette’s expanded grain management tools.

• Denoiser ML: Employs sophisticated deep learning techniques to eliminate unwanted noise from images while preserving critical features.
• Regrain: Samples the source image’s grain, regenerates and randomizes it for the purpose of adding it back to a degrained composite.
• Sapphire UltraGrain: Adds simulated film and digital camera grain to the image.

Primatte

Make quick work out of challenging blue/green screen footage.

Primatte keys out and replaces blue/green screens with transparency to seamlessly replace backgrounds. The GPU-accelerated algorithm uses three multi-faceted polyhedrons floating in RGB color space to isolate color regions. A 3D Preview display aids in the visualization of the keyed value.

PROFESSIONAL ROTO TOOLS

Silhouette is the world’s most refined rotoscoping tool. Create sophisticated masks using B-Spline, Bézier, X-Spline, or Magnetic Freehand shapes. Easy-to-use tools such as variable per-point edge softening and magnetic reshaping assist in creating articulate animations in record time. Render mattes with realistic motion blur or export to industry-standard shape formats.
Advanced roto tools include:

• Highly-optimized interface, layer controls, and toolset
• Specialized shape editing tools include magnetic splines, point groups, weighted keyframes, brush-based reshape, split shapes, collapse, and distribute points
• Integrated point tracking, planar tracking, and Mocha planar tracking
• IK (Inverse Kinematics) to animate limbs and all manner of jointed creatures
• Stereoscopic 3D workflow
• Built for teams and collaboration with review/approval notes for quality control

AUTO PAINT FOR SPEED AND RELIABILITY

Silhouette’s 32-bit float raster-based paint and tracking system meets the demands of high-resolution, color-managed VFX pipelines. A unique AutoPaint recording system delivers the speed of raster paint with the repeatability of vector paint on tasks like matte painting, beauty work, rig removal, or just plain paint.

• Paint Tools: Pressure-sensitive customizable brushes and presets. Includes Clone, Grain, Repair, Drag, and more.
• Non-Destructive Paint: Efficient layer system for high resolution film/video paint.
• Channels & Detail Separation: Paint on individual RGBA channels or work on separated detail and color views for advanced control.
• Sophisticated Cloning: Advanced offset and warping, onion skin, and display views enable a streamlined workflow for aligning, patching, and removing unwanted pixels.
• Powerful Tracking Options: Native point, planar tracking, and Mocha options.
• New Mocha Pro and PowerMeshWarp nodes enable warped surface paint workflows.

NODE-BASED COMPOSITING & IMAGE PROCESSING

Silhouette's core is a powerful node-based effects tree that delivers film-grade results. View and edit any combination of nodes for complex compositing, matte manipulation, keying, color correction, grain management, look development, morphing, warping, and much more.

Silhouette now includes 400+ specialty nodes organized into Color, Composite, Diffusion, Filter, Film Lab, Image, Key, Light, Sapphire, Silhouette, Special Effects, Time, Tints, Transform, Warp, and OFX groups.

Highlights:

• Gestural node-based compositing
• Improved tracking and spline data ports and node actions
• Updated OCIO v2 color managed workflow
• Customizable workspaces for dual monitor set-ups
• Exacting color grading with 4-way color wheels and presets
• Proprietary matte generation
• Edge tools to color correct or blur the composite's edge
• Matte manipulation using shrink, grow, blur, and wrap functions
• Now includes Sapphire effects (270 nodes) and Particle Illusion (1700+ emitters).

WARPING & MORPHING

Silhouette’s fully-featured shape based warp and morph tools provide the highest level of creative control and render quality for digital retouching, image deformations, and even talking animals. Create invisible touch-ups, subtle facial exaggerations, or dramatic transitions with either shape or pin options.

Watch Warping Video
With a rich history on some of the world’s most famous music videos and effects shots, unique “shape-to-shape morphing transitions” can be timed per layer with interactive previews for fast flexibility. 

Pin Warp is perfect for beauty work, allowing user-defined image areas using pins while leaving other areas untouched. Adjustments can range from subtle nip and tucks to something more obvious like repositioning an arm or leg.

KEYING & MATTE GENERATION

The powerful zMatte and Power Matte nodes use proprietary matte extraction techniques that handle the most difficult keying and matting challenges, including shots with fine hair detail, smoke, or reflections.

zMatte keying features multiple matte creation, light wrapping, edge correction, spill suppression, and matte manipulation. 

Power Matte’s unique interactive workflow enhances the matte creation process on normally non-keyable shots with foreground and background shape selectors that generate incredibly realistic and accurate results on semi-transparent objects.

POWERFUL TRACKING OPTIONS

The industry’s most powerful tracking drives Silhouette’s animation system and can be applied to speed up paint, roto, warp, and stabilization tasks. Choose from 1, 2, or 4 point tracking, native planar tracker, or award-winning Mocha tracking included as a standard feature in Silhouette 2021.

Applying pre-processing filters can increase tracker accuracy for problematic images. Choose Blur, Sharpen, Contrast, Gamma, De-Noise, or Remove Flicker. Post-processing filters can be applied to tracking data including Average, Smooth, and Merge.

SAPPHIRE, PARTICLE ILLUSION & CONTINUUM

• Sapphire: Best-in-class effects include UltraGlow, UltraZap, Lens Flare, Shake, and more.
• Particle Illusion: Add 2D/3D animated particle simulations like snow, smoke, and fire with fluid dynamics.
• More Filters: 12 select nodes from Continuum are included. Featuring Magic Sharp, Beauty Studio, Light Leaks, Video Glitch, Film Glow, and 6 new blur filters.
• Combine new plugins for compositing and effects.

MOCHA PRO NODE

Award-winning Mocha Pro planar tracking is now a node included with Silhouette.

Features:

• GPU-accelerated object removal
• PowerMesh warped surface tracking
• Insert compositing with AdjustTrack
• Award-winning stereo 360/VR tools