Splutterfish's Brazil Rendering System for 3ds max and Autodesk VIZ

Brazil r/s is developed for those who demand the highest quality from a renderer. Designed for use in Film, Broadcast, and Visualization, Brazil r/s' versatile toolkit integrates easily into existing production environments and empowers the artists to predictably and reliably create any look. Brazil r/s' advanced shading pipeline, extensible architecture, and natural workflow offers unprecedented control and flexibility, giving artists the freedom to focus on the Work, rather than wrestling with the "technology."

Benefits:

• Brazil r/s produces images of uncompromising quality. Advanced algorithms and a modern architecture have led to a rendering system that cuts no corners to achieve any look required, including the highest levels in photo-realism.
• Across-the-board integration with 3ds max and 3ds VIZ saves valuable time and money in retooling and retraining. Brazil r/s handles existing 3ds max scene files natively and is fully compatible with out-of-the-box and third-party 3ds max plugins. For artists, Brazil r/s provides a familiar, easy to use interface, minimizing the learning curve.
• The workflow of the artist and the requirements of production pipelines are integral to the design of Brazil r/s. As a result of being developed under fire in a production studio, Brazil r/s takes into account the realities and constraints of the production environment and is designed to be reliable, flexible, and controllable.
• Along with free 1.x upgrades and bug fixes, registered owners of Brazil r/s will be able to participate in the development and testing of new features as they become available.

Brazil Rendering System Key Features:

• Built on a highly evolved Global Illumination and Ray-Tracing engine
• Open, extensible, object-oriented design
• Full-latitude floating point operation, multi-threaded, and scalable
• Controllable and efficient use of hardware resources
• Bucketed rendering paradigm offers priority-based/ordered bucket rendering and selectable bucket-size for controllable use of available memory
• Interface has been painstakingly developed to provide unprecedented control, natural workflow and minimal learning curve
• Natural light modeling
• Physically accurate models make lights and surfaces behave in the manner one expects
• Non-intrusive operation allows interaction with max while rendering
• Sample files and scripts
• Documentation and tech notes
• Active community support channels including dedicated forums, chat area

Architecture

• Bucket rendering
• Sophisticated Anti-aliasing
• Controllable Over and Under-sampling
• Pluggable rendering sub-systems
• Layer friendly render pass system - highly configurable and easily extended with simple shaders.
• Separate sampling rates for different components (GI, geometry, image)

Shading

• Simple but powerful plugin shader design
• Advanced shading models
• Cartoon Shading
• Skin Shader
• Additional Shaders including Dispersive Glass, Chrome, Velvet, and more.
• Volumetrics/atmospherics support
• Raytraced Reflections and Refractions
• Sub-surface scattering
• Physically correct blurry reflections and refractions
• Utility material for extended control over advanced shading and illumination features

Lighting

• Global illumination
• Image-based lighting
• IES Light Support
• Full support of max point lights
• Brazil r/s specific Point lights, Area lights and Shadows
• Caustics
• Photon mapping
• HDRI rendering
• Bump mapped shadow distortions
• Sophisticated adaptive sampling for area lights

Camera

• Depth-of-field with Bokeh aberrations
• Image and Scene Motion blur
• Realistic lens and camera modeling

Geometry

• Supports 3ds max displacement mapping
• Reliable handling of large data sets
• Direct rendering of CSG isosurfaces

Misc

• Field rendering
• Currently uses standard 3ds max net rendering
• Floating license (not supported under Windows 95/98)
• Preliminary, evolving API
• Custom frame buffer
• 16 bit per channel tiff support
• Compatible with 3ds max R3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and VIZ 3, 4, 2005 and 2006

Brazil r/s Component Features

Render Engine: Ray Server

• Super fast ray tracing engine
• Several task-optimized accelerators tunable to scene needs
• GI support
• Bucket rendering
• Full-latitude floating point operations, effective & scaleable multi-threading
• Reliable handling of large data sets
• Efficient memory management
• 100 glasses
• Raytraced reflections on glasses, liquid and floor
• Raytraced refractions on glasses and liquid
• Caustics
• High quality anti-aliasing
• Render size: 640 x 480
• Rendered on dual Pentium III 1GHz CPU
• Render time: 3 minutes 20 seconds
• Top: rendered with 3ds max scanline in 37 sec
• Bottom: rendered with Brazil r/s in 7 sec

Render Engine: Image Sampler

• High-quality, sophisticated adaptive anti-aliasing for a crisp look.
• Over- and under-sampling.
• Global and local control over texture filtering.

Render Engine: Luma Server

• Physically acurate direct and indirect illumination
• ...yet they are still tweakable
• Enhanced shadows on bump mapped objects
• Extensive controls on sampling, and light bouncing
• HDRI friendly Skylight
• Render size: 500x416
• GI bounces: 12
• AA: 2x2 to 4x4 super sampled pixels
• rendered on single AMD T-bird 1.4GHz CPU
• render time: 1 minute 7 seconds
• Top: 3ds max R5 render in 00:11:09
• Bottom: Brazil r/s Render in 00:02:11

Render Engine: Render Pass Control

• Renders different elements of the scene for later use in compositing.
• Calculates only needed information
• Single click material, illumination and background overrides
• Selective ray depth pass
• Top: normal render / white plaster mtl override
• Mid: skylight shadow mask / chromatic shadow mask
• Bottom: reflections only / only the 2nd bounce of reflections and refractions

Camera Effects and BCam

• Depth-of-field with Bokeh aberrations
• Image and Scene Motion blur
• Realistic camera modeling with replaceable lenses
• Advanced Brazil Camera object for better workflow in 3ds max

Lights and B-Light

• Object lights
• Sophisticated adaptive area shadows and illumination.
• Full support of 3ds max lights & shadow plugins.
• Super fast raytraced shadows.
• Extensive photon emission for caustics and Global Illumination.
• Advanced Brazil Light object for superior workflow in 3ds max.

Brazil r/s System Requirements

Brazil r/s runs as a 3ds max rendering plugin and generally conforms to the same system requirements as Discreet's 3ds max (R3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and VIZ 3, 4, 2005 and 2006).
Brazil r/s is not supported under Windows 98 or ME.

System Requirements

• A computer running 3ds max (R3, 4, 5, 6 or 7), or Autodesk VIZ (3, 4, 2005 or 2006)
• Windows 2000, Windows NT, or Windows XP
• Intel-compatible processor at 300 MHz minimum (dual Pentium III system recommended)
• 128 MB RAM and 300 MB swap space minimum - Recommend 1GB RAM, 2.5GB swap