- In this video, we'll take a look
at how to use the brand new Stability node
in Silhouette 2023 to help you with the paint and comp work.
If you've never opened Silhouette before,
don't be intimidated
as this should be a fairly straightforward workflow.
So just follow along with me and let's get started.
(lively music)
The biggest benefit of using Stability
inside Silhouette is that it's pretty easy to use.
Let's say you're a video editor, you finished your edit
and then suddenly clients asks you like, "Hey,
can we remove the thing in the background?"
And you might have no paint experience at all,
but if you're Boris FX user,
you shouldn't be scared by that.
All you need to do is search
for Silhouette effect in your plugins list,
apply it over your clip and follow the simple workflow.
Let me give you a walkthrough through the whole process.
When you first launch the plugin,
you may find the simple node tree already pre-created.
Let's follow that.
The first node is roto.
So I click on that
and then go to my tools and select the X-Spline tool.
I need to draw two simple shapes
around my object that I want to remove.
You shouldn't be very precise.
The simple garbage mask like this would work just fine.
The first one is ready.
Now we need to draw a second one.
So I click on the X-Spline tool again
and draw my second mask.
Something like this.
Great. Now I would assign both of these shapes
to the one layer and call that Light Stands.
The next step is tracking.
So I follow to the track menu and I would use
Mocha planar tracker.
My layer is selected so I can click track forwards.
All right, looks good.
We're half way through.
Now we can move on to the actual cleanup.
The next node by default is paint
but repetitive patterns like this brick wall
may be really hard to work with, especially for beginners
as you need to be very precise.
where are you cloning from
and all lines should be aligned.
So instead of using paint, let's see how AI can help us.
I will delete the paint node and add Stability node
but here is the thing that I need to mention
before we continue.
In order to actually use the Stability node,
you need to have your DreamStudio account and your API key.
Once you register,
you will receive some amount of free credits
but each image generation will use up some of them.
So you will need to top up after you run out.
To find your API key, you need to go
into your account settings and copy it right from here.
Then inside your Silhouette preferences,
go to the machine learning tab
and paste your key in appropriate field.
Now that it's clear, let's get back to work.
Inside Stability node, I would switch the mode from generate
to the Inpaint and the model has been automatically switched
to the stable diffusion Inpaint v2.
There is a prompt field
but I would leave that blank for now.
The only setting I would change is number of images.
Instead of generating four, I would turn that down
to two to save some time and credits.
And now we are ready to generate.
We should wait a few seconds for the process to complete.
And boom, our perfect pattern has been generated.
You can swap between images to see what you like the most.
I think the second one looks a bit better
so I would leave that.
The only thing you'll have to do is to merge this image
with the original source footage
because we already did the track in our roto node.
That will be super simple.
I would create transform node,
connect the yellow data port to the yellow output
of the roto node and inside transform settings,
choose the layer that has the check information.
This is our layer Light Stands.
Now if I scroll through the timeline,
I can see that the image is moving.
Next step is to create a composite node
and combine the results together.
So a hit tab on my keyboard and search for composite node.
The first input should go into our plate
and the second one to our background layer.
We also need to connect the output.
And lastly, I would connect my blue matte input
to our roto node up here.
Then inside node parameters, I need to turn on obey.
That way images would be combined only
in that area where we drew our shapes in the first place.
If this edge looks too hard for you,
now you can go back to the roto node
and adjust the patterning of the shape by using the handles
or hit Control + A to select fall of the points
then hit E couple of times
to add patterning to all of the points.
Now let's check out our final results
and we are basically done,
and that took no more than two minutes to complete.
All right, that was for the Inpainting
but what about the generate mode
and when would we want to use that one?
Let me show it on another example.
So we have a lady, she drinks some kind of potion
and then something weird starts to happen.
She touches her face
and starts to insanely scream at her reflection.
The scene looks good overall
but with the help of Silhouette and Stability,
we can emphasize it and make it look even more scary.
So I have a couple of ideas.
What do I want to add here?
We won't be working with the whole shot.
So I selected only the middle section
where she touches the face and screams.
And as you may see,
I already did some preparation work with tracking.
So this video won't take couple of hours
and we'll be focusing only on the Stability part.
So let me quickly show you what I did inside Mocha.
I used PowerMesh to track parts of her face,
like the forehead and both of her cheeks,
and that looks something like this.
And then I exported the data into separate roto nodes.
So this one has all of the meshes
and this one contains alpha for the cheek.
And what do I need this for?
One of the things that they wanna add is a creepy texture
on her skin that will slowly crawl
and fill her whole face and the neck.
And to get the texture, I will use Stability.
I would leave the mode on generate
but I would switch the model to 1.5
'cause this is the one that I prefer.
Now let's came up with our prompt.
Let's try something like skin cracks photoreal 4K texture.
Now, you may ask why not just use the Inpaint mode again?
The reason is that we cannot use the Inpaint
for these kind of tasks because A,
Stability will generate only one static frame,
and B, if I try to Inpaint her whole face,
her appearance will just change too much,
and even may look like a whole another person.
That's not gonna work for us.
So it is much easier for me to just generate the texture
and then composite it on top
with the help of Mocha's PowerMesh
I switch it back to generate,
disconnect it from the roto node and try to generate again.
And after a couple of tries, here's what I get.
The thing is what I was originally expecting
to get is something like this
but instead, when I saw this one,
I thought that it looks much more interesting
and more detailed.
So I picked this one.
To blend it with the skin, I would use math composite.
The difference between math composite
and the regular composite
is that this one has blending modes.
You can use the mouse wheel
to quickly go through all of them and pick the one you like.
I would go with simple overlay modes.
Now I need to figure out the placement, color
and the MeshWarp.
I used transform node to first roughly position my texture,
then added an invert and color correction node
to adjust the brightness and also added just a little bit
of blur with the value of one.
Now it's time for our PowerMesh.
So I creates a PowerMeshWarp node and connect that
to the roto node that contains the mesh data from the Mocha.
That's the one that they show you in the beginning.
Then select the needed mesh layer.
And now if we scroll back, you can see
that the texture is warping.
When we blend it with the source,
here's how it looks like.
Let's also connect the alpha
for the cheek that we have up here.
We can reposition the texture in case we want to.
Okay, the texture and the cheek looks good
but it is visible through the whole range of the shots.
And I want it to slowly reveal.
The simple way to do that
would be to just animate the opacity
inside the composite node.
So you can put a keyframe with the value
of zero sum in the beginning and another keyframe
in the middle of the shot with the value of, my case, 70.
And now if I play it back, the texture is slowly revealing.
But if you wanna take that one step further,
the other way of doing that would be create a fractal noise.
Animate the lift parameter,
so it will go from completely black to normal
and use that as a revealing matte.
To do that, you would need to multiply the alpha
from the fractal noise with the alpha for the cheek,
and that can be done with the alpha composite node.
I connect the first input to the PowerMesh.
Second one goes to the cheek alpha
and inside node parameters, I select multiply.
Now I can feed all of that into the matte composite.
By doing it that way, the texture
will look just a bit more natural,
but if that sounds too complicated for you,
the animated capacity will work just fine.
I added a few more PowerMeshes
and repeated the same process for all
of the other parts of the face
by using the exact same texture.
I rendered the result.
So we can continue work on the shot
but it'll be a bit easier for my laptop to play back.
And this is how it looks like.
(upbeat music)
I also added a large crack element to the mirror
but I will skip this part
as Nick Harauz has just recently made a whole other video
on how to do a mirror crack effect.
So go check it out if you wanna see the technique in detail.
All right, let's add some more stuff to the shot.
Because the scene is expected to be happening
in some weird place like a witcher house or Abadon's attic,
this mirror looks a bit off.
It is just to clean
and I wanna make it look
like it was standing there for years.
So why not to try to generate some more textures
and make things a bit dirtier?
I added two more Stability nodes
and my prompt for the one was grunge texture photoreal 4K
and for the other one,
scratches texture on the black background.
Both work out pretty well.
So all I left to do is to merge that
with the math composite, add a decent amount
of feathering and add a brief touch of green tint.
So far, here is my before and after.
(upbeat music)
(person panting)
(person screaming)
And that's the end of the first part
where we utilize the power of Stability
to our comp our shot and speed up our workflow.
Join me in the next video to see how to finalize the scene
and dive deep into the grain management.
If you wanna see more Silhouette tutorials like this,
give us a like and leave a comment.
Follow to borisfx.com to learn
about other Suite products.
My name is Elizabeth Postol.
See you in the next videos.
(upbeat music)