Silhouette

Invaluable in post-production, Silhouette continues to bring best-of-class tools to the visual effects industry. Using an entirely stereoscopic workflow, all capabilities of Silhouette, including its award winning rotoscoping, non-destructive paint, keying, matting, warping, morphing, and 2D-3D conversion tools are stereo enabled.

Developed over the years with input by those working in the trenches, Silhouette runs like a well oiled machine. You will be up to speed with minimal effort and have the tools you need to handle the most challenging of shots. As visual effects artists ourselves, we understand your challenges and timelines. Our goal is to help you get the job done right, on time and on budget.

v5 What's New

Roto

Silhouette allows you to quickly create sophisticated animated mattes using B-Spline, Bézier or X-Spline shapes. Intelligent design and easy-to-use tools, such as variable edge softness on a point by point basis and realistic motion blur, assist you in creating complicated shape animations. Integrated motion tracking makes the normally tedious task of rotoscoping a breeze.

Roto Features

• Unlimited number of animated B-spline, X-Spline or Bézier shapes
• Stereoscopic rotoscoping workflow and tools
• Integrated Motion Tracker that can apply motion data to points or shapes
• Planar tracker provides automatic, markerless motion analysis and tracking
• IK (Inverse Kinematics) for animating humans, animals and all manner of jointed creatures
• Support for open or closed shapes
• Move, scale, rotate, shear, and corner pin shapes and groups of shapes
• Point-by-Point variable edge softness
• Realistic motion blur
• Animation changes for one point or selected points across all keyframes
• Independent shape viewing and hiding
• User-definable names, colors, blurs and blend modes for each shape
• Preview shape animation over image
• Shape import and export
• Composite preview and rendering
• Support for video fields and 3:2 Pulldown

IK (Inverse Kinematics)

Silhouette’s feature set has been augmented with the addition of an innovative approach to Inverse Kinematics. 3D modeling systems have long enjoyed the benefit of IK for animating articulated objects such as people, animals and creatures in general. Silhouette V5 adapts the layer system already familiar to Silhouette users to dynamically generate “bone” structures for articulated shape transformation. When the IK feature is enabled, dragging a shape such as a fingertip has the potential to transform an entire arm. Since so much of roto work is on articulated objects, Silhouette’s IK feature can be a big time saver.

Feather

Utilize motion blur to generate realistic roto shapes and/or use variable edged feathering on a point by point basis.

Paint

Paint is a high dynamic range, non-destructive, 2D paint system designed from the ground up to handle the demands of feature film and television production. Whether it’s image restoration, dustbusting, wire and rig removal or just plain paint, Silhouette provides simple and sensible tools to get the job done.

Paint Features

• Black and White, Blemish, Blur, Clone, Color, Color Correct, Drag, Eraser, Grain, Mosaic, Repair and Scatter brushes
• Non-destructive raster paint system allows playback of paint strokes on a range of frames or the entire sequence
• Automatic recording of paint events with selective stroke playback
• Track paint strokes and Clone sources
• Sophisticated cloning interface
• Motion track, position, scale, rotate and corner pin clone sources
• Color Correct, Blur or Sharpen the Clone source
• Paint on left and right stereo images simultaneously using an adjustable, keyframeable interocular offset
• Onion-Skin and Align tools to match up elements
• Presets to store brushes and their settings
• High dynamic range painting in 32 bit float as well as 8 bit

Auto paint

Auto Paint is a highly unique automated paint feature that records all paint activity with tight integration of both point and planar trackers. Paint strokes can be match moved or stabilized giving Silhouette the speed of raster paint with the repeatability of vector paint. The beauty of the system lies in the automatic recording of the paint strokes and brush settings. Individual paint strokes can be selected and repeated over many frames, as well as deleted. If the original footage changes, the entire paint history can be used to rebuild the painted shot, automatically.

Morph

Silhouette includes a fully-featured shape based image warping and morphing system that provides the highest level of control and quality available. Image warping and morphing can take place on stills as well as image sequences. Warping can be used to enhance or exaggerate facial features, adjust sizing of image elements, create talking animals or any other type of image deformation. Morphing has been traditionally used to transform one object or person into another and more recently to seamlessly transform a live action element into a CG (computer generated) object and vice versa.

Morph Features

• Distort and morph images and sequences
• Shape based morphing
• Transformations on a layer by layer basis
• Depth and folding control
• Integrated motion tracking
• Interactive preview

Warp

Warping can be used to enhance or exaggerate features, adjust sizing of image elements, create talking animals, for example, or other types of image deformation.

Morph

Morphing has been traditionally used to transform one object or person into another and more recently to seamlessly transform a live action element into a CG (computer generated) object and vice versa.

S3D

The S3D node is an add on option to Silhouette and contains a comprehensive 2D-3D conversion toolset for glasses-based (stereoscopic) and glasses-free (auto-stereoscopic) productions. It includes the technology and algorithms from 3D Impact Media’s RealityTools products.

• Shapes can be assigned individual depth values
• Horizon, Ramp, Hall and Tunnel gradient depth tools
• Alpha tool that converts the alpha channel generated by other Silhouette nodes (Keyer, Power Matte, Roto, Paint) into a depth map
• Adaptive tool that refines the depth map by adding edge detail
• Warper that transforms a mono image and a depth map into new stereo images
• Stereo Histogram display of the depth map
• Extensive list of stereoscopic and auto-stereoscopic display options available in the 3D Preview window for displaying stereo images
• Output for auto-stereo, multi-view and plain stereo displays

Depth Tools

There are a number of tools to create depth maps for 2D images which include: Constant, Horizon, Ramp, Hall, Tunnel, Edges, Alpha and Adaptive. The depth map includes the depth information for all objects in the image and is the basis for the creation of the desired number of views, being 2 for stereoscopic (glasses-based) 3D, or 5 to 9 for autostereoscopic (glasses-free) 3D applications.

• Horizon:
  The horizon depth object creates a horizon line.

• Ramp:
  The Ramp depth object creates a horizontal or vertical ramp blending out from the center.

• Hall:
  The Hall depth object creates a perspective gradient as if you are looking down a hallway.

• Tunnel:
  The Tunnel depth object creates a circular gradient as if you are looking down a tunnel.

Keyer

Using proprietary matte extraction techniques, Silhouette’s Keyer and Power Matte modules are capable of extracting almost any object in an image quickly and simply even if you are dealing with fine hair detail, smoke, or reflections. They are easy to use, yet provide the needed tools when faced with good, bad, or ugly shots.

Keying Features

• Interactive image matting tool
• DV/HD deartifacting
• Multiple matte creation
• Color suppression
• Sophisticated matte manipulation

Power Matte

Power Matte is an easy to use interactive image matting tool that iteratively estimates the transparency value for every pixel in the image, based on a small sample of foreground (what you want to cut out) and background (what you want to get rid of) pixels marked by defining simple shapes on the image. Results show that compared with previous approaches, our method is more efficient and requires minimal effort to extract high quality mattes for foregrounds with significant semi-transparent regions. In addition, the foreground edge colors can be estimated in the semi-transparent areas to create a seamless composite.

Trackers

Tracking is a technique that involves analyzing the motion of an image over time. In Silhouette, images can be tracked using an automatic image tracking system called Planar Tracking or Point Tracking which utilizes either one, two or four track points. Silhouette includes two Planar Trackers: Silhouette’s Planar Tracker and Imagineer’s mocha Planar Tracker.

Tracker Features

• Planar Tracking using either Silhouette’s Planar Tracker or Imagineer’s mocha Planar Tracker
• Planar Trackers provide automatic, markerless motion analysis and tracking
• Unlimited point trackers for manual precision
• Match Moving or stabilization of shapes or paint strokes
• Pre-processing filters for problematic shots include: Blur, Sharpen, Contrast, Gamma, De-Noise and Remove Flicker will increase tracker accuracy for problematic images
• Post-processing of tracking data to include: Average, Smooth and Merge
• Tracker export to popular formats *

  * mocha Planar tracking data can not be exported as external trackers.

Point Tracker

Silhouette v5 Downloads

Silhouette

Note: The Installers above include both the Silhouette standalone with the S3D option and the Import/Export Plug-in for Adobe After Effects.

User GuideS

v5 What's New

Silhouette v5 User Guide

Silhouette v5 Shape Import/Export Plug-in for Adobe After Effects

Silhouette v5 Customization Guide

Architecture

• Node based workflow
• Stereoscopic viewing and editing
• Command-Line Rendering
• Scripting and Actions
• OpenColorIO Color Management
• OpenGL® accelerated animation engine
• Multi-processor support
• Proxy management for large image sizes

Compatibility

• File Formats: Cineon, DPX, IFF, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, SGI/RGB, QuickTime, TIFF and TARGA
• Export Autodesk®/Discreet® gMask, Elastic Reality®, Eyeon Fusion®, Nuke® and Shake® 4.x SSF shapes
• Import Commotion, Elastic Reality and Shake 4.x SSF shapes   
• Mask interchange with After Effects® using the Silhouette Shape Import/Export Plug-in
• Import After Effects Corner-Pin, Nuke and Shake 4.x trackers
• Macintosh®, Windows®, Linux®

System Requirements

Because of the variety of different computer components available, we recommend that you download, install and evaluate Silhouette on the machine that you would like to run it on prior to purchasing.

Macintosh
• 64 bit Intel processor only
• Mac OSX 10.7 and above
• 2GB of RAM (4GB or more recommended)
• 1GB of available disk space for caching and temporary files
• Display with 1336x768 resolution for stereo, 1280-by-800 resolution for mono
• Three-button mouse or Wacom tablet

Windows
• Dual Core Intel or AMD processor
• Windows 8 64 bit, Windows 7 64 bit, Windows Vista 64 bit
• 2GB of RAM (4GB or more recommended)
• 1GB of available disk space for caching and temporary files
• Display with 1336x768 resolution for stereo, 1280-by-800 resolution for mono
• Three-button mouse or Wacom tablet

Linux
• Dual Core Intel or AMD processor
• Tested on 64 bit Linux with 2.6 kernel and GLIBC 2.4 or higher, such as CentOS 5.4
• 2GB of RAM (4GB or more recommended)
• 1GB of available disk space for caching and temporary files
• Display with 1336x768 resolution for stereo, 1280-by-800 resolution for mono
• Three-button mouse or Wacom tablet

Plug-ins
• Adobe After Effects CS5 and above

Recommended Graphics Cards

Required
• NVIDIA GTX 460 or better
• AMD Radeon 57xx series or better
• OpenGL 2.1 capable graphics card
• OpenCL 1.0 capable graphic card
• 1GB of graphics memory for film resolution