- [Ben] Hello and welcome
to Getting Started with Silhouette Paint, with
me Ben Brownlee from Boris FX. And in this exercise, we're going to look at some of the basic tricks we can use with the clone brush. We'll learn a few different ways of setting up the clone brush, plus some of the unique things that we can do with it, directly
inside Silhouette Paint. So let's get stuck in. (gentle music) Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is have a look at this
shot, and we're just going to go through it and show some of the basic, and not quite so basic ways of working with clone. So let's start up a brand new composition, and I'm going to add in my
Silhouette Paint plugin. I don't need any optional sources right at this moment, so
I'm just going to hit open. And it's going to ask me where I want to save it to, well I've got
my Silhouette Paint folder. So I keep everything nice and ordered, and I will call this one
tower blocks extended 01. Keep this at eight bit,
and create my project. And we've looked at some of the basic ways of working with the clone
brush in other tutorials. So by shift and dragging, I can change the offset interactively. Let's bring this up a little bit, and paint a little bit more
up into the sky very easily. There we go, lovely. That's a great way for
doing some quick cloning, because we can pretty much
see where we need to clone to. And just add, let's move that into there. Point to point cloning becomes
fairly straight forward. Now we can just add a little bit of extra detailing there. But what would happen if I wanted to add another building in? Say I wanted to duplicate this one in the middle here, but actually make it look as if it's
not an exact duplicate of the one that we have here. I'm going to reset my clone parameters down at the bottom here, and I'm going to turn this into interactive mode. And if you've seen the Silhouette paint basic overview video, then you've seen me use interactive mode before, but we're going to do a bit more of a deeper dive into this now. The first thing we have to do is choose to see how we're working
with our interactive area. So by default, we have the onion skinning. We can turn this into difference mode, and in difference mode, if I move this over the side here, you can see that wherever we have things
that are exactly the same, we get this nice middle gray. And wherever we see
things that are different, then they're going to show
up in a different color, either lighter or darker, depending on how light or dark they are. It's actually a negative, so you can see these a bit better. So if I move that over
there, looking lovely. We could also use the horizontal and vertical splits, that's
perfectly fine as well. But generally speaking,
I use the onion skinning, or the distance overlay mode to do most of my work in interactive. And even in interactive mode, we've got a nice keyboard shortcut to
see what things are doing, and that is the caps lock button. So if I hit the caps lock button, turn that on and off, we can see what's going on in
interactive mode or not. That just turns the overlays off, so we can see our unobstructed view. There's another way of
using interactive mode, above and beyond the full screen interactivity we've seen so far, and that is to use just a region. So if I click on the region, I can define my region box just by
clicking and dragging, and at that point, I
can then readjust this if I need to, just by moving
the bounding box there. If I want to redefine it, all I have to do is click and drag again, and that's going to give
me a brand new region, but we're going to focus on this one. When I'm happy with the
region that I've chosen, which I will be around about here, I can then go into interactive mode again, and now all of the scaling that I do is going to be around
this area of the region. So if I hold down shift, and scale in any of the corners, I can
scale that in proportion round about there, or if
I just grab the handles, I can scale just on the horizontal, or just on the vertical. And if I move any of the corners without shift held down, that gives me a corner pin around that region there. So this is great when we want to paint textures back in, something
like a tiled surface, for example, where we need to get this all matching in nicely. And this is where obviously moving it into difference mode makes all the difference. So you can really line things up properly. Now here I am just going to reset, because we don't really need that region. I'm happy just doing
everything on the main frame. Now when we have our interactive overlay turned on, I can do scaling by clicking on the corners of the box. There we go. I can move things around
by clicking inside the box. I can rotate things around
by clicking on the circle. And I can skew, if I
click on the little hatch, the little notch at the top here, or on this notch on the side as well. So we can skew things up and down. And I can change corner
pin on the entire frame by clicking on these
corner points over here. But more often than not, when you're doing a corner pin, it's usually a lot easier to do that on a region,
rather than the entire frame. Now if you don't want
to use interactive mode, all of these things are available, if I just turn on my overlay there, just by using the regular offset here, or the scale down here,
or even the corner pin with the top left and top right, bottom left, bottom right, and the rotate. Now before we paint anymore, I'm just going to play this
back, because as we see, our video is in motion. So it's at this point here, before we do anymore cloning, we
have to make a decision, are we going to be
using auto paint on this to paint through the entire frame? Or are we just going to be making a single static frame, and then motion tracking that in our compositing host? And this might not seem like a big deal right at the moment, but actually it can have some rather big
effects, and I'm going to show you exactly why. So I'm going to come into my roto, and I'm just gonna very quickly set up a shape that goes on our buildings, come into my motion tracker. I use the Mocha tracker
because it's there, and we just wanna do
translate, scale and rotation. And paint's smart enough to know that even if we don't have
a layer already made, it's going to make one for us, and put our shape in
there, because of course, we have to apply our
tracking data to a layer. And let's make sure that
this is looking all right, so I'm going to stabilize that up, and that is looking fine to me. Another good way of doing it is just using the home and end keys,
and just checking out whether there's a huge amount
of drift going on there. And actually, if we look at that there, I could probably stand to turn on perspective as well in this. There's a little bit of perspective drift, so I'm just gonna re-track that, and then we'll get back to it. Of course I'm taking in a
bit of non-planar movement in the background, but if you have a look at that one there, that's now fitting in really, really nicely. So that's just using
the home and end trick to jump to the first and last frames. It's pretty good. All right. Let's rename this one BT tower. Actually, they're little
background towers, they're the foreground towers. Foreground tower track, okay. And we'll come back into paint. So why is this going
to be important for us? Well let's just call this, let's rename our groups and
I'll show you exactly why. Extended tower two, and
I'll make another group, this is the one that I'm going to actually do stuff with now, which is
going to be new block one. And I won't do anything
clever with this one, maybe do something a
little bit more clever. I'm going to come into interactive mode, because it is just a lot faster, and just bring that into
the background somewhere, round about there. Doesn't matter, I'm not going to be pixel perfect, because we're going to redo this in a second anyway. But just so I can paint that in very roughly, there we
go, we get the idea. So I'm now going to auto paint this across the entire range. So if I come to my transform,
foreground tower track, go match move, and work area. Actually, I think that's
the whole thing anyway, so we'll just paint that in. And let's play that back
and see what we've got. I'm actually going to play that back without the stabilization,
and that looks fine to begin with, and then all of a sudden things start shifting a little bit, and the reason for that
is a very simple one. When we're doing auto paint with the match move here, the only thing that is getting match moved are our brushstrokes. Let's turn on visibility
of the brushstrokes there. So you can see that the
brushstrokes themselves are staying in exactly the right place. They're staying, whoops there we go, they're staying completely proportional to where they're meant to be. So why is this drifting? Well it's drifting because
our offset is changing, and our offset's changing
because when we added this tower here, we
scaled everything down, and we offset it. So let's see what happens
when we try that again. I'm going to come in,
back to interactive mode. Quickly scale that back in. Plant that round about there, just so there's a little
bit of air in between. Lovely. And I'm only going to make one change, and the change is going to be ticking on source match move. So this is gonna use the tracking data that I put in the transform to move the source as we move forward. Let's see if this helps. So let's take on the
same area, there we go. Lovely, lovely. Again, I don't have to be
very accurate with this. Let's come in and add
tower one, there we go. I would do the same thing,
add match move on here. All frames, and let's
just auto paint that in. Turn into foreground, make that play back a little bit faster, and it's come back frame zero, the start frame,
and show you the output, and let's have a look at
this, see if that's helped. Okay, so far so interesting. And in fact, it's almost
done the opposite. So now we've got the movement of the brush still in the same place, which is right, but if we check out what's going on with the onion skinning
here, I'll show you that source match move,
you see it's adding on that transform on top of
the regular camera movement. So in essence, we're
doubling the camera movement, not what we want. Let's undo that. Just if I do a regular
undo, and take a look here. (Ben singing) Eats up all of my auto paint, lovely. I'm going to undo one more time. Just get rid of that. Add in another one here. Add tower one. And let's show you the
proper way of doing this. Now the proper way of doing this is I'm going to keep
everything the same again. The only thing I'm going to change is turn off relative, here. So this means we have an absolute time, and it means we're always going to be cloning from frame zero, or we can change this to frame whatever, but we're always going to be
cloning from a single frame. And now if I do that same thing, let's just bring this in here, make this look nice. I'm going to make this look nice because we're going to see
this actually working now. And I'll just turn my view
back to foreground again, and then I'm going to
take both my tower extend and my add tower here, and then do the auto paint across both of them. Come back to home. Turn this back to output. Check out the moment of truth. Play that back. And that all looks absolutely fine. Now what's the difference between me extending this tower, and
me adding in a tower over here? Why did one require me to use source match move, and one not? Well the big reason for that is because when we added this tower here, we scaled everything
down, and we offset it. So that fixed pixel offset, it's obviously going to change when
we're scaling things down. And we can see just here, where we were cloning that from, we'd be
getting in all of that cloud, which is what we saw before. Whereas when we extended
the tower upwards, we weren't doing anything
with the scale at all. All we were doing was a fixed offset in the X and Y, no scaling whatsoever, and that fits perfectly. So we don't need to worry about source match move when we're
doing something like that. So just to reiterate
the point one more time, because it is so important, if we're using source match move, the clip
that we're cloning from can't have any camera movement. So it could be a still, which is what we get when we are using absolutely frame, or alternatively, we'd have to have a stabilized input coming
into the source here as well. And that means that when we use source match move, it's only using the tracked in camera movement that we have down in our transform. Hope that makes sense, because
it is kind of important. And the good thing is,
if you do mess it up, which to be fair, you probably will the first couple of times, you'll know what to change when you
have to go back and fix it, and it's a simple fix. Let's come back to the beginning again, and take another quick look at some of the other stuff that we
can do within our clone. I said this was going to be a deep dive, so we might as well get
nice and deep into it. I am going to come in, and I am going to now clone up, or
clone in, I should say, this tower block here. So I want to clone in
the extended tower block, not just the little mini
tower block I've already got. And this is where we would
go and change our source, because by default, if we haven't got any external sources,
we have just the two. We have output and foreground. Foreground is the clip that we start with. Output is the clip with painting on it. So if I do output there, immediately you can see my new tower block extending up a few floors. That's kind of nice. I'm also going to come in and do something a little bit different here. I'm going to place this over into the horizontal mode there, and just maybe, actually let's onion
skin it a little bit more where you just move that back into place, which is going to be round about here. And then I'm going to do the horizontal, sorry vertical split, because I want to do something with the grade and filter. Now we'll just turn the
vertical split back on, even though we've turned
interactive off now. Once we're in grade and filter, we can do this in a
couple of different ways. We can do auto-grade, that will try and match the color of
what we're grading from into where we're grading to. This can be quite funny. So sometimes if we've got patterns with similar textures,
that works quite nicely. If we've got things that don't have similar textures, we can get stuff that looks a little bit odd. And this often works better
for smaller clone brushes, because as soon as we start
to go a little bit big, sometimes that auto paint can
get a little bit confused. But this is great for
skin, or for doing tiled textures, like that there. It works in really nicely. But not great when we're moving between textures, like that. So going from cloud to
cloud, that works out well. If we're going from cloud to building, not quite as good. But we don't have to use auto-grade. I can turn that off, and I can now come in and just adjust this, either the gain, gamma, and lift, just by clicking and dragging. And if I hold down the
control all command key, we have a lot more fine detail about how we drag that in. So I can make this a little bit darker and knock that back just a little bit. I can also unlock these, so we can start working on red, green and blue channels separately, if we need to. Let's lock those back up, because I don't really need to in this instance. Let's just knock that back a little bit. I also have blur, and sharpen, if I need to use those too. Obviously that can help out if we are trying to, just knocking something out of focus a little bit more, if it's further away from the camera. Or if we've zoomed up a little bit, and things are getting a bit soft, we can obviously add a little bit of sharpness to our image as well. So a little bit, you're probably not going to turn that up to 200. A little bit is probably just
a few points of sharpness. The other thing we've got is the warp. Now let me just extend
this out just a little bit. And the warp's really great. And this gives us a pin warp
directly within our clone. So why would we want that? Well, in this case, we'd want it to try to make sure that our towers aren't looking absolutely identical. So what I can do is I can try and push my tower block over there a little bit. Let's squeeze that in. And I can either try and push back, or if I just double click, that's going to add in what's called a tack, and a tack means that there's no changes happening around that radius there. So now I can change the perspective of this tower block very easily, just by pushing that in. I need to make sure that my tower block stays nice and straight. We don't want a fat, dancing tower block, this isn't Prague. It's a pretty good reference, look it up. So now, if we enable, or if we disable and enable that there, you
can see what we've got. Might have gone a little
bit too far on that. So that's pin warp. So we're warping from here, and pushing it over to there, and these are the tacks. These just preventing the warping. If I hold down the control or command key, then we get to change our strength on both attack and on the pin warp. If I want to delete any of those, obviously we can just right click on them, and remove that pin, or I
can make a pin into a tack. Guess what else we can do with warp? Yep, we can also link it
to our tracks as well. So this makes warping
across time a lot easier. I don't need to do the
transform in the warp, because we are just cloning from a single, absolute frame, frame
zero, source match move. So let's come in here. Turn off my onion skin. Take this nice and easy. In there. And of course if I was
doing this for real, I would go in and probably come in with my eraser tool, and just clean that up a little bit. Clean that up around the edges as well. Just hold down the alt key, so I can then do nice
straight brushes as well. There we go, beautiful. Before, after. Before, after. And why not, let's just auto
paint that through as well. And for a quick pass,
that's looking all right. So obviously I'm going to work a little bit further on this shot,
and when I have done that, I'll save this out, come back in. It's applied immediately of course. We can start to end up
with some tower blocks that look a little bit more like this. Now another thing that's changed within these two is the
background, the sky. The sky's looking a lot nicer here, and that's because I've used this as a sky replacement. Now this also needed a bit of work, and the work it needed was to clean up the tower block and remove the bits that we didn't want from there. So tower block and windmill. And this used a couple
of different techniques. I'm not going to go through the whole shot for you, but I am going to show you some of the stuff were things
were a little bit different. Let's open this back
up in Silhouette Paint. And I will just get
rid of the first frame, so I can paint this up
a little bit for you. Because I used a couple
of different techniques for doing this, something we haven't looked at with the clone yet. I'm gonna reset everything here, but just make sure that my source is set to output, because
when we're cloning from this kind of area here, obviously going to want to
go over the same area twice. And if we had that set to foreground, we'd just be painting
our tower block back on, so I don't wanna do that. Now the first thing I
did was just do a rough, very rough pass, just to extend the clouds over just a little bit. I wasn't even really thinking about what the clouds were doing here. My main goal was just to get rid of the tower block itself, and just going a little bit from both sides, there we go, just so that when we meet in the middle, round about there, we have some different patterns to go with. So that's kind of rough. It gives us an idea of what
we're going to aim for. So the next thing I did is I looked at my two different clone presets. So this is a cool thing that I can do. I can have two clone
presets in the same brush. So this one here, if I take
the opacity down to 80. Looking all right. And if I come over to
my clone source here, I can take that from somewhere
that's slightly different, somewhere round about there. I'll set these both to relative, make sure those are both on relative, there we go. And what I can do is
I can use the keyboard short court alt shift
one, and alt shift two to change where I'm cloning from. So I can clone a little bit from here. Clone a little bit from there. Clone a little bit back over there again. Clone a little bit here. But where it gets even more interesting is I can use dual brushes. So now you can see I've
got two clone sources, I've got the red and the green, and the only difference is which one is active at any given time. So at this point, now I
wanna make paint changes, I'm sort of weighting these half way between source number one,
and source number two. If I take my opacity down a little bit, maybe build that up, and
change both of these. Clone source is over here. I can start to get in some slightly more interesting and subtle changes that are going between these clouds. If you see what the changes I've made over there, they are
looking a bit more subtle than what we had on frame number one, where we'd just done
the initial paint out. The other thing to look
at, and this is definitely an advanced technique, is something we've got in our roto mode here. I've got a couple of things set up. I've got a windmill
track, which is following the blades of the windmill, and I've got my windmill shapes as well, and these are roto splines that I've created, again following the
blades of the windmill. So if I come back into paint, let's come onto the first frame where we can actually see this thing here. I can turn on my show
shapes, and that will show me the shapes that I have available to me from the roto node. So if I just come in, and we'll just take a nice big blue brush. Gonna paint over the top. Oh let's turn the opacity up again. Paint over the top, doesn't seem to be making any difference at all. Now if I want to use these shapes to limit where I can or can't paint, I'm just gonna use obey alpha over in the right hand corner. And now I can only paint within my shapes. The reason they're painting quite fat is because we look at the roto over here, I've got a shrink, grow on them as well. So they are quite fat. They're fatter than a
normal shape would be. The normal shape looks like that with a bit of blur on it, but these ones have got a bit of blur and
a lot of fatness on it. So that's why it's looking like that. Undo that. And I can invert that alpha as well, so it's only going to be painting outside of those blades. So that can be useful when you want to hold a clone, or in fact, any paint stroke out
from a certain object, you can just use the
obey alpha right there. And that's exactly what
I did with this one. We have our shapes
rolling over the top here. I have my blades, we're
going to see those thing. These are just clones. These are just clones
moving over the top here, and to make sure that they're right, I did the match move over the top. So if I delete that current frame, get rid of that one, do this one here with the blades, make
sure that's match movement with the windmill track, and I'll go from the current to the start, and auto paint that backwards. That's quite an advanced thing. Because we've got that match move on, it's moving the strokes,
but not the source behind the windmill there. If that's melting your brain a little bit at the moment, that's absolutely fine. It's a lot of information to take in. I just thought I'd show it to you, because it's something we can do. So if I come back out of here. I won't save that. Coming to the comp that I made earlier. So we've gotten rid of the windmill, we've gotten rid of the
tower block on this side, and just to fill in a little bit more, I've added in, oh we
can't even see that there. There we go. I added in a couple of
extra bits of foliage, which actually just the painting stuff I've already done with
a lumikey over the top, just to add in a little
bit more detail there. And that's been a very deep dive into the clone tool in Silhouette Paint. We've looked at a ton of stuff. We've looked at simple ways
of moving the clone source. We've looked at the interactive mode and what we can do with there. We've seen how we can work with
the different compare modes, how we work with the extra
grade and filter and warp tabs, and really importantly, how we deal with the relative versus absolute frames when we're doing cloning,
especially when we're working with a clone source that
requires us to do match moving. So now we've had a look at what the clone can start to do, it's really up to you to start practicing with
it, and really exploring the different possibilities that you have with not just the clone
tool in Silhouette Paint, but all of the tools and how you can start to use them to make
some really exciting projects. Whether that's set extensions, matte paintings removed,
all of these things can be done a lot faster
using Silhouette's hybrid paint system, which gives you a huge amount of these flexible tools, plus the speed of working
in a raster based system, coupled with the
repeatability and auto paint you'd normally only find in
a vector based paint system. My name is Ben Brownlee from Boris FX. Thank you very much for joining me in this getting started with
Silhouette Paint series. To learn more about Silhouette Paint, join us in another exercise where we talk about Silhouette Paint's tools, or possible Silhouette Paint workflows. Thanks for now, and I
will see you again soon. Thanks for watching. What sort of projects
would you use paint on? Let us know in the comments. More in depth explanations and tutorials can always be found in
the Silhouette manual. Download a free trial of Silhouette Paint now from BorisFX.com. (upbeat music)
