Hi, I am Mary Poplin from Boris FX, and you might know me from my Mocha and After Effects
tutorials . For digital beauty work, I often combine Mocha Pro tracking and After Effects
compositing with Photoshop’s paint and clone tools.... but in this video I’ll show you
how Silhouette’s advanced paint and compositing tools help me accomplish all these tasks in
one streamlined workflow.
Beauty Work and skin clean up is in just about every bit of media we consume lately, but
since it’s an “invisible art” most of us would never know.
Silhouette is an incredible, Award Winning paint and roto software that has been used
on famous Hollywood feature films for many years.
In this tutorial, I will show you Silhouette’s basic workflow and how to remove blemishes
with tracked roto-paint and integrated Mocha planar tracking.
But Silhouette now goes beyond paint, we’ll also touch on the node-based effects tools
to go beyond “roto and prep work” to advanced compositing.
First, I will show you how to create tracked rotopaint inside of Silhouette.
I will start a new session using this footage clip of a model with a slight blemish by dragging
and dropping my clip into the upper right hand tree window.
This will create a new session so long as my dropdown menu is set to "no session."
One helpful thing Silhouette does to speed up your workflow is that it has built in session
templates to automatically build custom layouts and node trees based on your task.
The Composite template adds an Output node to the Source and selects the Composite workspace.
The Paint template adds Paint and Output nodes to the Source and opens a paint layout in
a Streamlined workspace.
The Roto template adds Roto and Output nodes to the Source and selects the Streamlined
workspace.
And the Roto+Paint template adds Roto, Paint and Output nodes to the Source, connects the
Roto > Objects output to the Paint > Objects input and selects the Streamlined workspace.
You can rename the session in the Name field and click OK and your new session is hooked
up correctly for you.
But, I am working on this from scratch instead.
Next, I apply a paint node.
You can drag the node to your tree or simply select the clip and double click the effect.
Because this actress has a red blemish, I can simply paint on selected color channels
instead of affecting detail, this is a huge boon for creating seamless paint for beauty
work while keeping the details intact.
In the newest Silhouette 2020, I can choose to paint on the image as normal, or use the
built-in frequency separation tools to limit my paint to either the color or detail areas
of the shot.
I can either blur this stroke by using the blur brush OR I can clone paint the blemish
away by using the clone tool, but there’s many other tools that could be used like the
dedicated blemish tool.
As with all software, there’s many ways to do the same task and it will depend on
the shot and personal preferences.
But notice that when I paint, the paint is only applied to one frame.
Silhouette features a unique raster based paint system with auto-paint animation.
For feature film and high resolution, frame based paint shots, Silhouette is incredibly
robust and will not bog down your system.
To apply my stroke across the entire shot, I need to do a few things.
First, I want to track and apply the tracking data to my paint stroke.
Then we enable autopaint to run the paint across the frames.
So first I will select my footage by single clicking it and then I find my roto node and
double click.
Tracking is available as a separate node, but is also built into other nodes such as
Depth, Morph and Roto nodes.
And since I need to have a shape to create a track to begin with, I am going to use the
tracker in the roto node and drive tracking like I typically do in Mocha.
To make tracking less tedious, set the View to Foreground for the fastest speed.
The foreground view doesn't use as much image processing and is faster than using the normal
view> output.
I will create my shape on the frame where I made my paint stroke and start tracking
from there, but with Mocha planar tracking we track best where the texture we are tracking
is largest in frame, least blurry, and closest to camera.
In this shot, that happens to be frame one.
I am going to use a solid shape for speed and make a rectangle around my talent's eyebrow.
It does not have to be a tight shape and you can use more than one shape for any given
track if they fall on the same plane of motion.
I can either choose the Tracker tool in the Toolbar or use (Shift-T) to select the tracker
tool.
Silhouette 2020 has multiple tracking options: point tracking, a robust planar tracker and
now Mocha tracking is included.
I am going to use the Mocha planar tracker tab and you can see my options are very similar
to Mocha AE and Mocha Pro.
I almost always get a good enough track from the luminance channel, so I don't tend to
mess with the tracker preview much before I use Mocha unless my footage is particularly
challenging.
Skin texture isn't terribly challenging for Mocha.
But if you are dealing with adverse tracking conditions, pick the color channel that displays
the best contrast in the object you are tracking in the preview dropdown menu and
adjust any preprocessing settings to add contrast as needed.
Now I can disable the Preview in Pre-Processing and select the tracking shape I created in
the Object List here, I can click either the forward or backward tracking button depending
on which direction I need.
In this case, track forwards.
It really helps to rename this tracked object to something easy to find again, like "eyebrow
track."
When the track is complete, the tracking data is automatically applied to the selected node,
in this case our roto node, which is all fine and good but we want it on our paint node.
So I simply select the handily color coded yellow tracker output and drag it over to
the tracker input on the paint node.
Then I use the dropdown menu in the paint node to select the tracked object from my
roto node "eyebrow track," if I had more tracked layers they would all be in this dropdown
menu, which is why it is important to use common sense naming conventions.
I select my paint stroke (or strokes if I have painted several) and decide what frame
range I want to apply autopaint to, in this tutorial, I am using "all" frames.
Then I select the matchmove option under autopaint and hit the play button either forwards or
backwards as needed.
Now my paint is applied across the shot and I didn't have to paint this tediously frame
by frame, and this works regardless of whether or not I am using a single stroke or multiple
strokes just so long as I make sure to select the strokes I want to use.
This technique can be used for everything from beauty work to full set extensions and
matte painting, so don't get mired in the fact that this was just a small paint out.
The ability to accurately track cloned paint strokes rapidly is a game changer and I like
to think that Silhouette gives me all the tools that I used to use Photoshop and After
Effects for in one interface.
Another feature I appreciate is the ability to stabilize a shot in Silhouette and paint
on the image as if it were a photoshop file.
This is incredibly easy, I simply click the stabilize button and paint as if the film
was stabilized based on my tracks in the dropdown menu.
If you have many areas to paint, you can simply have a roto or tracker node in your tree and
all your tracks will be populated into the list to be used as needed.
This technique works best for fiddly paint jobs that require multiple brushstrokes on
different frames, otherwise, if you need to populate a stroke or group of strokes across
a shot, simply use autopaint instead.
But what do you do if you've got a bunch of tiny blemishes?
You can actually use Silhouettes node based tools to build up a frequency separation tree
to do multipass blurs on the various detail levels to achieve this look.
I can build a tree using extract detail to smooth out large details and medium ones while
keeping the small details that make skin look human, look for another in depth tutorial
on this at a later date.
Or, because Silhouette is an OFX plug-in host we can run Sapphire and Continuum plug-ins.
So if I had a project with many beauty shots, I might choose to use Sapphire’s Beauty
and glow filters to help automate the process.
OFX integration means hundreds of our Sapphire and Continuum filters, and thousands of presets,
like glows, lighting effects, lens flares, and artistic filters… all are at your fingertips
in our robust Silhouette compositing package.
There's so many options for creating stunning images of relentlessly beautiful people, and
we have all the tools to help you take your art to the next level.
We are so excited to have Silhouette in the Boris FX family of tools.
To learn more about Silhouette, please visit us at www.borsifx.com, where you can find
Free Training Videos, Official Documentation, Boris FX news, Artist Interviews, Case Studies,
and so much more.