Inside Brazil r/s 1.0

By Nick Nakadate (NickN@MulvannyG2.com)

The highly anticipated release of Brazil r/s 1.0 arrives for AEC visualization artists using discreet’s 3ds max™ or Autodesk Viz™. With all the hype being thrown around these days regarding render engines, we are seeing some heavy hitters step up to strut their stuff. Let’s have a look at what Brazil r/s can offer the AEC world.

Workflow

Brazil offers its own set of light and camera objects, materials, as well as advanced GI and toon rendering. All of Brazil’s features work with or without their Max and/or Viz 4 counterparts, so one can get to work using existing DWG, Max, or Viz models and improve quality more so with Brazil materials, lights, cameras, etc. as needed. I have followed two workflows with Brazil. The first workflow is starting with a Viz or Max file that is completed, and then modifying it as needed; if a material needed more definition or punch, I would create a replacement material, or replace a light with a Brazil light for more control. Intermediate test renders directed me to more tweaks along the way. The second workflow is applying materials and creating Brazil lights from the start. The workflow depends on your needs and familiarity with Brazil and Viz or Max. I have found either workflow rewarding and reliable. The Brazil compatibility with Max and Viz allows just about any level of implementation at any stage in the process, which is a huge bonus.

Rendering with Brazil r/s

First off, I must stress that the public free downloadable beta of Brazil r/s is just that—an early beta that does not have near the functionality and speed of the full 1.00 release. Splutterfish provides a support forum using IRC where help can be provided regarding rendering questions.

The Brazil renderer can be accessed from the current renderer list in the render dialog. Although its detailed settings may seem like a lot, I found it was fairly easy to navigate after experimenting with some of the test scenes. Many of the best settings are defaults, meaning tweaks have to be made to only a few settings. I’ll touch on a few of the nicer options in the Brazil render dialog.

Variable bucket size and interlacing is a great way to “speed” test renders. The bucket interlacing is used to render the image in several passes, as opposed to

rendering the image in consecutive bucket order. This is useful in that it allows you to see a broader range of the image before the rendering completes.

Brazil’s use of anti-aliasing (AA) is a huge benefit to workflow and reasonable render speeds. The AA minimum and maximum values can be set by the user and raised as needed. Low quality render tests can be performed with low AA settings to make sure the scene is rendering as desired, and then higher quality AA settings can be used for finished renders. In my workflow I undersample all initial and test renders (something like -2, -1, or -1, 0) and then increase from there as needed. Using undersampling will allow for much faster workflow and more attention to the global illumination.

A portion of the Brazil render dialog.


Interlacing Passes Image courtesy Splutterfish, LLC

The Render Pass Control is a long-needed tool for compositing. It allows a way to quickly and conveniently render out a specific 'pass', without compromising the original scene setup in any way. A render pass could be as simple as a rendering that only includes some of the objects in the scene, or as complex as rendering only the 5th bounce of reflected rays. This is immediately useful for sky and glass compositing.

Distributed, single-frame rendering, as well as network rendering, is available. Brazil has it’s own interface for distributed renders. Segment count and render type are set by the user and sent to the Max or Viz Queue manager as separate jobs. An unfortunate quirk of both the Brazil and the Viz distributed render is that all jobs are sent to all server machines at the same time. Jobs are kept and rendered by the machine that starts rendering the job first. The next job is then sent to all servers and the process is repeated until are jobs have started rendering. The good news is the distributed render does work, it just takes a little longer than it should because of Max/Viz opening and closing to start rendering jobs, especially if the files are very large. I successfully and consistently rendered several large files via five machines.

Brazil Distributed Render

The Ray Server controls reflections and refractions. I found the “Max transparent Intersections” setting control key to obtaining desired transparency with some NPR toon and diagrammatic renders that dealt with transparency.

Ray Server Dialog

The Luma Server is where you control the light settings of all lights used in Brazil renders. These lights include all of the default max lights, Brazil’s Area Lights, and Brazil’s Sky Light. Here you to have control to enable and disable all lights and shadows, and you also control the sampling and the behavior of the lights. The settings you’ll want to pay close attention to are the Indirect Illumination, “Allow default lights” (I keep this off most of the time), Skylight checkboxes, Shade Rate, and View and Sec rates. The Shade Rate controls the number of Global Illumination samples per image sample. The View Rate is the sampling rate used by the sampler to generate the global illumination in the scene. The Sec Rate determines the sampling rate used by the sampler to generate Global Illumination samples, when the sampling point is seen as reflected/refracted in an object. This usually allows you to get away with lower values - especially for reflective, convex, surfaces. Again, like the AA settings, initial renders can be done with the default settings and increased from there for more polished results. The default view rate, sec rate, and number of bounces are a good starting point.

Luma Server Dialog

Brazil skylight allows for a sky color or an environment map. Skylight can be designated to affect direct and indirect illumination separately in the luma server.

Skylight can be used to contribute to the GI in a scene along with any lights. Unfortunately, sunlight is not present in Brazil’s lighting options, leaving Viz’s daylight system the option for accurate sunlight at designated locations.

Brazil utilizes global and caustic photon mapping with precision control. Photo-realistic renders are much more readily attained with the highly accurate GI that acts as one would expect. Inclusion of Sub Surface Scattering (SSS) of light will prove to be the finishing touch on scenes with delicate balances of material and light. HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) support adds more to the lighting toolbox.

Benchmarking Performance

The large data sets Brazil can handle paves the way for extremely complex scenes. Don’t be afraid to open those ”Do Not Render” files. More than likely, they will render, and your only enemy will be your CPU’s file load speed. I rendered a few of mine, and found the RAM usage to be far below other rendering engines. Brazil handled several million-poly scenes with ease.

Another great reason to use Brazil over vanilla Max or Viz is the speed of the raytracer. A recent test of a 4 million poly scene with about 50 lights, four of which cast raytraced shadows, rendered in one hour with Brazil (no changes to the original Viz settings); in Viz the same scene rendered in just over 4 hours on the same dual Ghz PIII box. In another comparison, a dual PIII 1Ghz box beat out a single processor 2.5 Ghz P4 box (with a 533Mhz frontside bus) by a 600% increase in speed.

With Brazil in use, it is easy to afford GI renders when the Brazil raytracer makes up for any speed vanilla Max or Viz render engines lose.

Another GI Example of the Sponza. The scene below rendered at 800x600 with max materials and one Brazil light and Brazil GI in 1 minute 47 seconds on a Dual PIII 1Ghz computer. After researching the Challenge.N3.net website I found this image blows away the other render engine competition, regarding speed and quality as factors.

Scene modeled by Marko Dabrovic For THECHALLENGE.N3.NET.
http://hdri.cgtechniques.com/~sibenik2/

Brazil Sub Surface light Scattering: Image courtesy of Richard Annema

Brazil GI: Image Courtesy: www.arnoldimaging.com

Brazil GI: Image Courtesy: Scott Folts, RA, of Ashley McGraw Architects

Image Courtesy: www.arnoldimaging.com

Brazil Lights

Brazil lights come in the five types of: Omni, Spot, Directional, Rectangle Area, and Disc Area. The lights allow complete control over hotspot, falloff, focus, and attenuation. Shadow types available are Brazil, Area, Advanced Raytraced, and Shadow Map. Handy workflow options include display of the light’s properties, global and caustic photon generation counts, and illumination and shadow include/exclude lists. I found myself using all lights equally in place of the corresponding Viz or Max lights. The visible attenuations and hotspot and falloff decreased scene set-up time and the number of render tests. I am hoping IES lights will be supported in the next release, as these are vital to many renderings. Inclusion of lighting analysis tools would be ideal as well.

Hotspot, Falloff, Attenuation, and Decay are all visible in viewports.

Cameras

Brazil Cameras are extremely versatile and do just about anything you would want. Orthographic to fisheye lens projection types offer solutions to most camera needs. The Bcam Wizard offers almost all camera and focal length presets. Brazil DOF, environmental, and clipping plane options populate the rest of the rollout, along with the camera icon options. The visible camera ranges helped speed up shot set-up for most scenes. Overall, Brazil cameras are a big improvement over default Max and Viz cameras.

Depth of Field, Environment Ranges, Clipping Planes, and Cone Display

Materials

The wide range of Brazil materials will surely allow artists to push more boundaries with the multitude of subtle, and not so subtle, material call-outs encountered on projects. The Brazil Advanced material gives unprecedented control (via a GUI) of almost every aspect one could need. The advanced material serves as a “container” for Brazil-specific shaders that are based on Renderman™ shader language. I was very impressed with the options that greatly exceed the Max and Viz material options. I felt in more control of the materials than ever using Brazil shaders. Since the Brazil shaders are in the Viz and Max format, material creation was very easy. The advanced options allowed for the “extra” tweaks to make materials read just right.

A portion of the Brazil Advanced Options

The inclusion of Brazil glass and Brazil chrome make for much more realistic and attainable results in less time than the default Viz or Max materials.

Brazil Glass in action with caustics: Image courtesy of Splutterfish, LLC

Oilcanning in curtain wall with Brazil glass, Brazil chrome, and caustics.

Car paint and wax, base shaders also offer quick solutions to seemingly age-old material needs. Object lights that contribute to GI also add to Brazils material/lighting solutions.

Brazil Object lighting

Brazil Car paint shader: Image courtesy of Splutterfish, LLC

Brazil toon materials open the door to many NPR effects, and should not be underestimated. Map slots for line and surface properties allow for simple and complex NPR renders. Toon base shaders include: gooch, multilevel paint, and material pass-through. Gooch is a non-photorealistic way of representing most technical drawings. It usually consists of a transition from a warm tan color to a cool blue color. Multilevel paint is the traditional cel shading style used in animations. It allows one to utilize several steps of shading to mimic traditional cel drawings. The material pass-through allows you to use inking lines around any material, without having to use the paint option.

Brazil Toon Material

Brazil Toon using transparency, noise, and gradients.

Brazil Toon: Gooch Fire truck: Image courtesy of Splutterfish, LLC

Brazil Toon: Stipple: Image courtesy of Splutterfish, LLC

Plug-in Support

Many will be happy to see RPC and Piranesi support, along with several other vital plug-ins. RPCs render just as in max or Viz scanline. The RPC Cars are Brazil-ready also. Piranesi EPIX files will need to be rendered with the “enable the 3ds max compatible Z-buffer” option checked due to Brazil’s handling of the Z-buffer.

Brazil Toon: Stipple: Image courtesy of Splutterfish, LLC

The Bottom Line

With such a rich and reliable 1.0 release, Brazil is sure to be an extremely valuable tool in the design toolbox of small and large companies alike. The care taken to ensure compatibility of Brazil and the workflows with Max and Viz makes for a powerful rendering solution most users will warm up to quickly. Brazil has stepped up the evolution of rendering, and put the pressure on all the competition. Although I don’t have my copy of Max 5 yet, 3ds Max users have told me Brazil provides a significant improvement over the 3ds Max 5 Light Tracer and radiosity. With the few wish-list items and complaints I have, I have no doubt Brazil will continue on, participating in leading the way to more and better high quality AEC and VFX renderings. And, yes, Brazil r/s was well worth the wait.

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