The new Silhouette release from award-winning developer Boris FX puts the efficiency of machine learning (ML) algorithms into the dedicated hands of the film and television industry’s top paint and roto artists. Silhouette builds upon last year’s release, which introduced its first internally developed ML tools, with three new nodes that further cement Boris FX’s commitment to creating AI tools that help artists, not replace them.
“The needs of artists who use our products are at the forefront of everything we develop,” states Boris Yamnitsky, founder and CEO of Boris FX. “It’s important to our product teams that we take a holistic approach towards AI to continue to give artists total creative control with the added bonus of being able to take advantage of this innovative technology. In the case of Silhouette, our new ML tools offer massive time-savings on advanced roto and paint tasks with a quality unavailable in traditional tools.”
“Silhouette 2024 introduces artist-assisted machine learning (ML) matte creation. Using traditional tools with Matte Assist ML is a game changer,” notes Marco Paolini, Silhouette’s product manager and designer. “A single frame matte can propagate over the entire scene without manual intervention on simple sequences. When working on more complex shots, multiple keyframe input produces a more accurate result, which can then be refined with Power Matte to produce natural edges. We are excited to see what our customers create with these new tools.”
“Boris FX Silhouette sets the standard for industry-level rotoscoping and paint work and has always been our go-to tool,” remarks Josh Barham, paint & roto supervisor at Oscar-winning visual effect studio Framestore. “Silhouette offers unparalleled precision and a robust toolset that empowers artists to achieve their creative vision with ease and efficiency.”
Silhouette 2024 Highlights
- Instantly create animated mattes from a single frame. Artists can use the Roto node or new EZ Mask node to create input mattes and then allow the new Matte Assist ML node, driven by machine-learning object segmentation and propagation, to finish the task. Data port communication between nodes delivers faster results with less work.
- The Optical Flow ML node generates motion vectors using machine learning to quickly estimate per-pixel motion between frames. The node offers rotoscope artists significant time savings when tracking shapes, objects, or point trackers and also includes a new Auto KeyFrame tool that uses flow data together with manual animation to speed up roto tasks.
- The Retime ML node produces pristine time warps (speeding up/slowing down shots or selected frames) with animated ramping. The ML motion estimation and retiming models deliver smooth movement with minimal artifacts.
- New support for Adobe Photoshop brushes gives Silhouette’s fast and non-destructive paint tools another boost.
- Performance enhancements include foundational improvements that allow Silhouette to better utilize a system’s resources, 15-30% speed increases when using multiple GPU nodes, smarter cache utilization, and a new Cache node that caches all upstream nodes to disk for faster playback.
The release also features updated nodes with the newest compositing and visual effects tools from sister products Mocha Pro 2024, Particle Illusion 2024, and Sapphire 2024.5. View full product page.
Pricing & Availability
Silhouette is available as a standalone application and/or plugin with monthly/annual subscriptions, upgrade & support plans, and permanent licenses. Host application support includes Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro, Foundry Nuke, Blackmagic Resolve and Fusion, and Autodesk Flame. See store for more details.
Silhouette customers on active subscriptions or upgrade & support plans receive the corresponding 2024 release as a complimentary update through the Boris FX Hub licensing application. Learn more about Boris FX Silhouette 2024.
