- With Silhouette 2022, we now have a choice
of over 450 different effect nodes,
including the full Sapphire Suite
and some choice effects from Continuum.
In this tutorial, we are going to be taking a look
at just a few of them,
and how we can start to put them together.
(light bouncy tones)
We're gonna be looking at this shot.
So I'm gonna be relighting the scene,
but using the lighting cues that we already have in here.
Now, the native Silhouette effects have always been
divided into different categories.
With introduction of Sapphire, as part of Silhouette,
you'll see that Sapphire itself has a tab,
and then we have further categories
that are breaking this down over on the left hand side here.
And there are a huge number of effects
that we're definitely not going to get to.
But one of my favorite categories is the lighting category.
I'm just gonna take an S_Rays,
and try to enhance the light that's coming in
through this blind.
So I hit minus on the keyboard to move this around.
There we go, and sort of bring this out,
kind of where the sun would be.
And down in the parameters,
I'll make my rays a lot brighter
and let's take the threshold down as well,
so we can get more rays coming in.
And just blur those up just a little bit.
Okay, but we can already see
that we have a bit of an issue coming through,
and that's because we're picking up too many
of the bright object in the scene.
But that's not a problem.
We can just add another effect upstream.
And I'm gonna just go into the Sapphire adjust
and use just, like a utility filter, which is S_Gamma.
And I can just actually use the offset, darks,
just to bring that down a lot and bring the gamma
all the way down.
Just basically, we're gonna be getting rid
of everything here, just making it all pretty black.
But the reason I'm doing it this way is to show you
something that is built in
to pretty much every Sapphire effect.
And that is Mocha.
So if I click on edit Mocha,
this brings up a version of Mocha
that is built directly in to the effect.
So we don't have to add in other Mocha nodes,
we can just use the Mocha that built directly into Sapphire.
So I can just create a little area around the window,
save and exit, and that blacks out just the window.
It's the opposite of what I want, but that's okay,
'cause I can just go into my Mocha here and go invert Mocha.
Boom.
Maybe blur that out just a little bit.
Now we'll take a look, what happens in the edge rays?
I'm only getting that going across there.
Pretty nice.
Now, even edge rays has an edit Mocha here.
Now this is actually slightly different.
Certain Sapphire effects have built in
parameter tracking as well.
I've got my center all the way over here,
so I have to zoom out and move around,
but I could use this to track the blind here.
Let's actually just do that while I'm talking.
So I'll be tracking the blind here,
and check out what happens to the center.
So the center is moving in concert
with this tracking data here.
So we've just created a quick track there.
So if I save and exit out of here,
instead of using this as an additional mask,
I can come in over into the node parameters again,
center uses Mocha and we'll play that back.
Look at that. Very nice.
So now we've got actually the rays moving up and down
in the right sort of way.
That's good.
So's just move those over there for a second.
I'm gonna alt click, just to add a couple of dots in
just so that our node tree is gonna stay looking nice.
Let's bring that down there.
And I'm gonna add in another effect,
because I wanna have some dust going through
those light rays.
Now another new effect for Silhouette is Particle Illusion.
Now Particle Illusion isn't part of Sapphire.
It's part of the Boris FX Continuum Suite.
So we'll find it over here in special effects.
So Particle Illusion, I'll just drag that in there.
And let's just add that over here. Very nice.
I'll just launch Particle Illusion.
Now as the name would suggest,
Particle Illusion is a particle generator system
and this is just the default viewer here.
So over on the left hand side, we have our presets
plus a little preset viewer,
just so we can have a little look at what's going on here.
There are, you know, thousands of different presets
and we could even search these.
So I'm just gonna search for some dust,
'cause that's what I'm looking for here.
And we've got some nice dusty things,
including one of my favorites, seeds and clouds.
I do like that one.
Right, I'm gonna use Floating Dust 4K.
So this is just a very, very simple bit of dust
going on here.
I'm just gonna double click on this.
Let's play this through.
You see the dust is just popping in there.
I won't do too much with it.
I think we'll just leave the dust as it is
and I'll just hit apply,
and we've got it back in Silhouette.
And if I play that back, you can see that the dust
is floating around,
but it's not matching the movement of the camera.
And that's actually easy to fix.
So if I come down into my nodes down here,
we've got different ways of doing transforms.
So we can either transform the world,
if it's just the camera that's moving.
We can transform the emitter,
if the particle emitter is moving.
So we want to track it to someone's hand
or a tailpipe or something like that.
Or if the world and the emitter are moving,
then we can choose world and emitter.
So it's only the camera that's moving in this shot.
So I'm gonna come to transform and go world.
And now I have a choice.
I can either just keyframe this up,
or I can use the data port
to bring in tracking data into this,
which is exactly what we are going to do.
So if I come over to my nodes,
I'm gonna go to search and go for tracker,
and let's bring a tracker over here.
And I'll just connect this over there.
Make this look nice.
Just again, holding down the alt or option key,
just adding a little dot node there,
and let's just track this through.
Now, I'm not going to do anything
amazingly clever with this.
All I want to do is track the back of the wall.
I can actually take in quite a big shape.
That's not a problem.
Come back to my tracker.
I'll use the Mocha tracker
and I only want to track in translation.
I'll track that forwards.
And then when that's done,
I'll come into the timeline,
see where I need to track it backwards from,
and let's just track that backwards.
You notice that because I had no layers created,
Silhouette automatically made a layer one for me
and attached the tracking data to that layer
because tracking data is always attached to a layer.
All right, let's rename this one, camera track
or cam track.
And I'll just bring this up and pipe it in to my data port.
Get this looking even nicer. There we go.
Okay, so if I come back into Particle Illusion, now.
Move to a different frame
and come down to my world transform,
under the dropdown menu, I can see any of the layers
that I have connected to the data port.
And you'll see this data port is now available
in many effects,
specifically for dealing with this parameter tracking.
So if I come in and go to camera track,
that's gonna now give me my world transform
that I was after.
And that's now moving along with the world,
possibly, like looking back at this,
possibly rotation would've been an idea as well,
but I think that's gonna be fine.
The next thing I want to do
is actually composite this together
so that the dust is only coming through where the rays are.
So we need to look at what else Particle Illusion can do,
when we come up to the top and look at our composite,
because by default,
the composite style is set to direct or classic mode
where the particles are composited
directly onto the background clip.
If we choose alpha plus apply mode,
we use the alpha channel from the particles,
plus an apply mode that we choose here.
So this could be overlay, this could be soft light,
this could be screen, add, you know,
there's lots of different ones that we have available to us.
We also have none.
And none just shows us the particles.
Now the particles themselves look a little bit bizarre
at the moment,
and that's only because of another feature
we have in our viewer.
If we look up at the top right hand corner,
we're looking at this as RGB straight.
If we wanted to see this as it would be
sort of pre multiplied on black, this is what we've got.
So we hit it over black.
Let's just head back to RGB straight.
And I'm gonna add another node now,
because when I'm compositing this,
I don't need to work with RGB straight,
we're gonna see the particles pre multiplied with black.
And surprisingly enough, that node is called pre multiply.
So I'm gonna take my pre multiply,
put it on the Particle Illusion,
and now we just have our dots.
Great. Let's composite this together.
So composite.
Okay, so I want my rays to go into the background.
I want my particles to go into the foreground.
There we go.
And I want to use a mat to only see the particles
in the area with the rays.
So I'm gonna take another copy of the rays
and just pipe that into the mat input.
Now in my composite, I can have a little look,
change the dropdown menu from alpha to luminance,
and if we play that back, I can now see the rays
and the particles only showing in my light beams.
And let's use a math composite
to composite that over the top.
And maybe change that blend mode from add to screen.
So I wanna boost the rays, but not too much.
And through the miracle of editing,
let's just tidy this up a little bit more.
I'm just gonna finish this off with one of our color looks.
And because we've got Sapphire
built directly into Silhouette now,
I could use something like ColorFuse
and come in, just bring that in there
and use ColorFuse to find a look that I'm I'm happy with.
So I load up the presets,
and we've got a lot to look through,
including black and white film stocks, color film stocks,
or more stylized looks.
And as we go through these,
you may not see them update in the viewer,
which is why we've got these nice,
bring this up here,
which is why we've got these nice thumbnails
to look through,
to give you an idea of what things are gonna look like.
So I'm gonna take something, ooh, where do we go?
Let's go M independent hit. There we go.
And while we've got it back in the Silhouette interface,
we can just use the sliders
just to slide that into place there.
It's kind of nice.
If I didn't want to use ColorFuse,
of course, we also have film stocks
as a native Silhouette effect.
And we take a look at the presets,
there's so many presets in here.
They've divided into different categories.
So I can look at black and white film or cross processing,
motion picture films, maybe I'll pop into movie looks.
And I kind of like this Hunger Games-y type thing.
So let's come back into our node.
The best thing about these film stocks
is that they're mixed a bit heavily,
but we have an amount slider at the very top.
So I can always come in and just tweak that
to how I want it to be.
I can also still have full control
over all of these settings.
So if I think the blues have become
a little bit desaturated,
I can just push the blue saturation up a little bit more.
Yeah, I kinda like that.
As we play that back,
we can see that I've done exactly what I intended to do
when we started out, which is to relight the scene,
make it a little bit moodier.
And we've done that using a combination
of some of the new nodes available to us in Silhouette 2022,
including Sapphire effects, like rays and ColorFuse,
as well as Particle Illusion to help,
to bring in some environmental effects.
I hope you found this useful.
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX,
and I hope you join me in more Silhouette tutorials
in the future.
Bye for now. (light music)
If you want to learn more about Silhouette
or even give it a try yourself,
then head on over to BorisFX.com
where you'll find hours of free training
for Silhouette, Sapphire, Mocha, Continuum
and all of the Boris FX products.
And you'll also be able to download a free trial.