Boris FX Silhouette 2022 – 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.

Packed with Effects Tools

Top Boris FX tools are now included in Silhouette.

• Sapphire: Award-winning plugins with 270+ effect nodes and thousands of presets. Featuring the best lighting effects, lens flares, and creative image processing filters for VFX.
• Mocha Pro: Now included! Featuring PowerMesh, Remove and Stabilize. New data ports and node actions connect the Mocha node to native 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.
• More Filters: Select Continuum nodes with fast GPU processing. Including Magic Sharp, Beauty Studio, Light Leaks, Video Glitch, Film Glow, and new blur filters.

New Nodes for Invisible VFX

• InPaint: Apply the InPaint node to remove unwanted pixels using auto-generated textures from surrounding image data. Effective for removal of unwanted objects such as markers, blemishes, or wire removal when using open splines! Learn more about InPaint
• PowerMeshWarp: Using new data ports, connect the Mocha Pro node to this node for efficient “reverse warp stabilized” painting or rotoscoping. Useful for beauty work and painting on skin and fabric surfaces.

Tracking & Roto Improvements

New Surface tool and DOD update with cropped tracking for precision and speed.

• Data Port update enables the Mocha Pro node to pass tracking and spline data within Silhouette’s node graph to paint and roto for improved workflows.
• Point Control Parameter Tracking. Drive lens flares, particles and more by channeling data into any node via tracking data ports and new transform property pop-up menu.
• Node Actions: Create Mocha generated nodes without launching the UI. Save time with Copy Data, Create Roto Node, Create Tracker Node actions. Watch Video.
• More tracking exports: Silhouette adds more tracking and roto export formats with the Mocha Pro node with more support for Nuke, Fusion, Flame, FBX, and Alembic.

Architecture and Speed

• Apple M1 support delivers speed boosts on newest Mac hardware.
• Improved OCIO v2 color management features GPU rendering and improved ACES support on color managed projects.

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