Tech Reviews

from Animation Magazine - April 2023 -329

EDUCATION & CAREER GUIDE

- By Todd Sheridan Perry -

Boris FX’s Silhouette 2022.5

Silhouette 2022.5 is the latest version of Boris FX’s roto and paint software, although I should note that it does much more than that. This release is heavily leaning into Cryptomattes, which quite frankly is such an obvious move that I’m not sure why it hasn’t always been used. In fact, Cryptomattes originated as a way to provide control mattes from CG objects based on ID or other user-established parameters. When it comes to roto, we have been delivering mattes as alpha channels, or if we wanted to get fancy, we could shuffle individual mattes into the red, green and blue channels of an EXR. However, pushing the roto layers and shapes into Cyptomattes to be accessed through your compositing software just makes so much sense.

As you create your roto in Silhouette, the shapes and layers are assigned a unique Cryptomatte ID. When the data output of the roto node is connected to the input on an Output Multi-Part node, the IDs will be written into your output EXR files at render time.

This workflow is immensely helpful when you have scenes with lots and lots of objects with individual roto shapes. Or even parts of a character that have different elements – like a shirt, hair, pants, glasses, etc. And in Nuke or After Effects or any software supporting Cryptomattes, you can choose one (or many) of the shapes to generate the control mattes you need.

In addition to the Cyprtomattes, Boris FX has added a color estimation node to its compositing tools. The feature looks at the FG color and BG in areas where the mattes are transparent and provides a color estimate for the edges. This helpful process prevents fringing on your comps because it is shoring up what the colors of the FG edges would be as they mix with the background. Slight quibble: I’m not sure how this will help me if my compositing tool of choice is Nuke rather than Silhouette – but I think some lessons can be learned.

The fantastic InPaint node has been granted some more controls to help with its already powerful magic for auto-tracking and auto-filling for removal and cleanup. There’s also the PowerMesh Warp node to stabilize non rigid surfaces for more accurate cleanup.

Like Mocha Pro, Silhouette has also been updated to support the Apple M1 chip. To top things off, OCIO v2 color management includes improved ACES support and GPU acceleration. I think the Cyptomatte stuff is definitely worth the price of admission if you don’t already have Silhouette.

Website: borisfx.com/products/silhouette

Price: $795 (per year); $150 (per month)

Boris FX’s Mocha Pro

Mocha Pro 2022.5 is the latest release from Boris FX, and it comes with a slew of new features designed to make life easier for visual effects artists and motion graphics designers. These range from under-the-hood improvements to interface and UX updates.

First and foremost, Mocha Pro is known for its planar tracker. However, the tracker isn’t as effective when you have jacked footage that’s out of focus, dark, noisy or flickering. So, a parameter interface has been added to control image pre-processing to help that tracker track a little better. It allows you to blur or sharpen the image, adjust gamma and contrast to lift darks and separate edges, denoise andeduce the flicker in footage coming from inconsistent light sources.

Another new feature is the Lens Module which helps distort and undistort your footage with open splines, rather than relying on edge detection. You can draw splines that conform with objects in the scene that are straight and Mocha will determine the lens distortion, which, as any good tracker knows, is critical for getting locked tracks. This distortion data can be exported to an external file to be imported into other scenes that may be using that same lens. A bread-and-butter workflow that Mocha Pro is frequently used for is mapping graphics or pictures or signage to surfaces and tracked to them. To make things more streamlined, a dropdown menu has been added to the surface so you can choose commonly used formats. You can go with the size of the surface tool (source) or the correct aspect ratio of the artwork (insert). Or choose from standard ratios like 16:9 or 4:3 or 2:1 — well, 2:1 isn’t particularly standard, but you get the idea. You can also type in your own ratio. This seems like a simple thing, but the possibility of an aspect ratio error is very high — which, if you make it, won’t leave your client or employer too happy.

M1 support is now included, along with ProRes import and export. You can set your frame rate to custom rates. When using MochPro as a plugin, Mocha will return to focus if you switch to the host program. A bunch of performance tweaks and bug fixes were also added. Ginally, something that Boris FX seems very excited about: support for zooming and scrolling with the mouse wheel!

All in all, this is a healthy .5 upgrade — and it’s all free to Mocha Pro subscription holders

(as it should be)!

Website: borisfx.com/products/mocha-pro Price: $595 (per year); $75 (per month)

Boris FX’s Continuum

The 2023 version of Continuum was released this past fall with an added bunch of new features and presets to the already existing vast library.

BCC+ Atmospheric Glow is the filter that Boris FX is pretty confident will be your new favorite glow — and it’s a pretty good bet. The idea behind it is to mix different filters and light types into a single effect, adding complexity and versatility to the looks. Rays, fogs/ smoke, flickers and lens textures, can be layered and mixed. As with other Boris FX filters, Atmospheric Glow has a bevy of presets to set a foundation look before you dig into the controls to customize and make it your own.

Film Glow gained a few new parameters for secondary glows with their own slider, again to give the look even more complexity. Ten new transitions have also been added: Film Roll, Swish Pan, Swish Prism, Swish Glow, Swish Warp, Linear Wipe, Radial Wipe, Rectangle Wipe, Vignette Wipe and Texture Wipe.

That’s a lot of swishes and wipes to choose from — and they get added to the innumerable transitions that you already had in earlier versions. Frankly, the list is a bit intimidating.

Speaking of overwhelming choices, Boris FX also added over 250 new presets to the previously existing filters. But most important, to me anyway, is the updated Particle Illusion (which is a bit of software that I’ve been using for a very long time). Improved caching speeds up interactivity and playback. The UI has been revamped for easier readability and UX. Fluids now have better controls to help with transitions between actual fluids and “dumb” particles. And emitting from images and 3D objects have been optimized and updated for more controllable emissions. Thanks to all these updates, you have a 50% overall speed increase (depending on your system of course.)

Again, like the other Boris FX products, Apple M1 is supported along with NVidia and AMD-base GPU acceleration. Also, if you already have a subscription to Continuum, then you already have access to these latest updates.

Website: borisfx.com/products/continuum

Price: $295 (per year); $37 (per month)

Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist whose credits include For All Mankind, Black Panther, Avengers: Age of Ultron and The Christmas Chronicles. You can reach him at todd@teaspoonvfx.com.

A Day In The Life

This month, we have the pleasure of catching up with Andrea Gerstmann, the talented art director of the new PBS show Work It Out Wombats! (The GBH Kids show, which is created by Kathy Waugh and exec produced by Marcy Gunther and Marisa Wolsky, follows three creative marsupial siblings who live with their grandma in a treehouse apartment complex!) on the editor, it’s