Brazil r/s V2

Rendering System

  

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."

V2 Highlights

In addition to all of Brazil r/s' base features, Brazil r/s V2's most anticipated new features include:

· Overall rendering speed improvements
· Rendertime displacement
· 3D motion blur
· Irradiance render cache
· Light portals
· New Advanced Feature Textures Maps
· New Implicit (CSG) Objects
· Texture / Light baking
· Easy to use windows installer/updater

The Gold Standard

Brazil r/s is the industry standard for high-end quality, flexibility, reliability, and artist-friendly workflow in 3ds Max.

Production Proven

Brazil r/s was instrumental in breaking 3ds Max into wide-spread high-end CG production. Brazil V2 continues our tradition of developing software in studio environments, and having already been featured in several films while in beta, we're confident that all artists will benefit from the additional tools and performance those beta testers demanded.

The Highest Quality

We could go on and on about the benefits of quality software, and the technicals behind how Brazil r/s allows artists to attain images of superior quality, but ultimately, it's the imagery and the work that speak for themselves.

Flexibility

Whether your needs include film quality production rendering, architectural or engineering visualization or just 3D artistic expression, Brazil r/s is the renderer of choice for artists and studios world-wide. By being a truly compatible 3ds Max renderer, and by supporting the widest possible range of 3rd party plug-ins, Brazil r/s V2 lets you achieve any desired style of rendered output without having to retool your entire pipeline to suit a specific renderer.

Reliability

No matter how mundane it may sound, reliability in your renderer, and especially on your renderfarm, is key to your ability to work efficiently, deliver on schedule, and avoid unexpected interruptions during a job. Brazil has always had a reputation for great reliability and we believe V2 will be setting new standards for how reliable a renderer can be.

Workflow

Brazil's unbeatable, flexible, and artist-friendly tools are without a doubt the fastest and the easiest to work with of any rendering toolkit available. Time saved adjusting renderer settings is money-in-the-bank when it comes to your ability to tweak and improve imagery. Efficiency is key to creating quality imagery, and nothing kills efficiency like fighting with inefficient tools.

Raising The Bar

SplutterFish understands that rendering is key to what many of our clients do. We also understand that rendering means more than just installing a new plugin. Rendering is about quality, it's about how working artists produce their imagery, and it's about how the tools work with the rest of the systems a studio relies upon. Brazil r/s V2 is a suite of tools designed with these needs in mind. Once again, Brazil r/s raises the bar and re-asserts its dominance in the rendering food-chain.


  


Overall Speed Improvements and Improved Maintainability

· Completely rewritten core and almost entirely rewritten 3ds Max integration
    - Simplified and streamlined codebase that is entirely plugin driven
    - System maintenance greatly improved due to clarity and separation of core and       integration API
· Focus on performance improvements on realistic production scenes, including complex   interior GI and massive instanced data handling
· Aggressive multi-threading - Brazil r/s V2 is unaffected by the 3ds Max r7/8/9 cpu affinity   issues
· New large-dataset-accelerator which effectively replaces the need for the old ray server   accelerators

New Render Features

· Unlimited number of render presets, independent of the 3ds Max preset system which was   introduced in 3ds Max 6
    - All presets are accessible via trackview, making it easy to copy tracks from one preset to       another
    - Entire parameter sets (for example all Luma Server settings) can be instanced (shared)       between presets
    - Extensive descriptive text can be entered for each preset
· New z-depth and surface normal adaptive antialiasing tests
· Improved antialiased image filtering and texture filtering quality
· Many additions and improvements to the render pass system -- more finite control of exactly   what goes into each renderpass and more customizability added to pre-defined passes
· Atmospheric visibility in camera views, reflections, refractions, GI and Sub-Surface Scattering   can all be determined independent of each other
· Basic Texture Baking is now supported
· Luma Server (illumination/GI engine) changes:
    - Many new GI-adjustments added - e.g. saturation, basic black/white point, multiplier,       gamma adjustment, and tinting
    - Light portals are now supported - speeds up skylit interiors by magnitudes!
    - Skylight 'Receiver' excludes - exclude objects from receiving Skylight.
    - Irradiance Render Cache - Fast. Very fast. Add Auto-Occlusion or Retracing for some fast       addition of detail in nooks and crannies and/or next to bright objects. Works well with       motion blur, reflection, refraction, and all other ray traced effects
    - Improvements in GI sampling -- combats the problems where objects previously had to       be exploded apart to force edges to show up
· Support for 3ds Max 8's Floating Point Frame Buffer (in 3ds Max version 8 and later only, of   course)

New Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) Sampling Core

· Manages interactions between QMC (blurry) effects such as glossy reflection/refraction,   motion blur, GI, and subsurface scattering
· Keeps noise amount and appearance consistent when QMC effects interact, such as skylight   visible in glossy reflections
· Prevents render times from spiraling out of control in scenes that combine many such effects
· Controls flicker during animation, maintaining consistent noise appearance across frames   and different computers.

Improvements and Additions to Photon Map Rendering and Workflow

· Overall general improvements in speed
· Improved lighting behavior in animated scenes
· New Photon Viewport Datascope - for photon debugging, setup, and 'impress the clients   during project reviews!'
· Photon precomputation - dramatically speeds up regathering of photon maps
· Storing of direct illumination - for scenes with lots of lights, or complex lights (area lights,   lights with area shadows, etc.) Further improving regathering speed
· Global photon count multiplier values and methods
· Photon Map-specific energy filters (saturation, gamma, tinting, etc.)

Brazil r/s V2 Materials: New Features and Improvements

· Glass Material - improved Dispersion shading
· Toon Material
    - All new inker - same basic concept, but higher quality -- works well with non-standard       camera lenses
    - improved Gooch shading - now supports multiple light sources
· Utility Material
    - Sub-Material overrides for different ray types - camera, reflected, refracted, shadow, and       sub-surface scattering. Can be used for passes and to create special material FX.
    - New Saturation controls for GI send and receive
    - New, separate photon-affecting GI override controls, including material, tint, and       saturation.
· Advanced Material
    - Area light specular highlight support
    - Sub-surface scattering (wax "deep scattering" and skin "subdermal scattering") code has       been improved

New Brazil r/s V2 Texture Maps

· Raytraced Reflect/Refract Map with all the controls from the Glass and Chrome material   allows adding advanced reflection and refraction effects to any 3ds Max material.
· Occlusion Map - useful for Ambient and Reflection occlusion passes, dirt, and other special   effects. Implements Ambient, Reflection and Refraction occlusion, along with focus controls   and attenuation.
· Subsurface Scatter Map - add subsurface scattering effects to any 3ds Max material. Includes   focus controls and the option to scatter along the refracted direction for many different   material looks, from marble, to soft wax, or even urethane.

3D Motion Blur Support

· Camera movement and rotation blur
· Object movement and rotation (transform) blur
· Deforming mesh blur - [WIP as of pre-release]
· Particle blur, including PFlow support - [WIP as of pre-release]
· Flexible shutter controls for manipulating shutter bias as well as opening/closing speed

Displacement Support [WIP as of pre-release]

· Built in Displacement for the new implicit Brazil r/s V2 primitives (BzSphere and BzPlane)
· Rendertime displacements on any object via the Brazil r/s Displacement modifier
· Multiple displacement types supported
    - Analytic - easy to use, with very little memory overhead. Great for very shallow       displacement, or distant objects
    - Heightfield - faster than analytic especially in ray tracing heavy scenes, or close to       camera.

New Brazil r/s V2 Objects

· BzSphere - implicit CSG sphere -- mathematically/visually perfect sphere, no geometry
· BzPlane - implicit CSG plane -- replaces Brazil r/s V1's ground plane -- can be placed/aligned   anywhere and can be finite or infinite in size.

Brazil r/s V2 Camera Improvements

· Multipass effects supported
· The lens types' parameters now appear nicely in a new rollout, rather than a separate dialog.
· Depth of Field moved entirely to the cameras
    - Includes per-camera sampling values, bokeh settings, f-stop/focus distance.
    - DoF hugely improved to be super fast and cleaner, especially when combined with effects       like glossy reflection and GI thanks to the new quasi-monte carlo core.
· All new viewport and controls UI

Brazil r/s V2 Light Improvements

· Improved area light sampling with optional automatic quality control
· Extensive projector light controls
· Greatly simplified photon UI
· Largest support of IES libraries in any 3D product - over 30,000 files tested - many of which   3ds Max can't even support!
· Custom curve controls for focus and attenuation are now RGB based, allowing complex   gradients
· New light shader driven architecture allows freely mixing light shapes with different focus   shapes, and easy expansion of light capabilities
· All new viewport and controls UI - easily hide/unhide rollouts and features
· Creation modes updated - easily set hotspot/falloff for a 'spot' light while creating the light.

New Brazil r/s V2 Shadow Map

· New native Shadow Map - supports rectangular mapping, map tiling with memory limitation   options, and a host of new filtering types (avoid stair stepping with low-res shadow maps)
· Supports non-polygonal implicit objects like the BzSphere and BzPlane and render time   displacement

New Scripts - Some supported, some not

· List of thousands of IORs (Index of Refraction)
· Compare map speeds
· Write render times, resolution, disk space, etc. into your temp folder, or on your render with   an...
· Extremely flexible overlay script
· Save rendering and rendering-related settings in preset files or in internal storage, and load   selectively
· Check for new versions without logging into your Account

Easy to Use Windows Installer

· Simply click through and be done
· Or choose your own options
· Or dump the files to a folder along with an instructional file for techie folks with custom   network deployment software
· Check for updates from the Installer

Updated and Extended Brazil r/s V2 Manual

· Bigger, full of detailed descriptions, notes, tips and sample imagery in both rendered and   explanatory schematic form

Miscellaneous

· Production tested
    - Superman Returns was the first major motion picture using Brazil r/s V2
    - Ruby Tuesday's 2005 super-bowl commercial with 4 photoreal Cooper minis -- earliest       known production use
    - Many more productions since these.
· Runs side-by-side with, does not replace, Brazil r/s V1.2 - conversion scripts included to   moving scenes between the two

Removed Brazil r/s 1.2 Functionality

· Dropped legacy 3ds Max 3 support
    - 3ds Max related code is now cleaner and much easier to maintain without the many       workarounds required for R3 support
    - Everything now supports 3ds Max's paramblock2, for better UI compatibility and scripting
· Brazil Basic material removed -- converts up to a Brazil r/s V2 Advanced Material