The Brazil Rendering System originally created by SplutterFish LLC is an advanced rendering system developed to meet the requirements of professional artists.
Brazil has, for some time, been a popular rendering plug-in for 3ds Max and has been instrumental in breaking 3ds Max into wide spread high-end CG production.
This latest professional rendering technology is now available from inside Rhino thanks to a collaboration between Splutterfish LLC and McNeel.
Key features include:
There are quite a few Rendering options for Rhino3d users, some are plug-ins some are standalone renderers. Some are faster, some are easier to use, where we can help is in explaining those many differences and helping you find the best solution for your particular focus. Contact us with questions, we’d like to hear from you.
Brazil's render engine uses the raytracing method (as opposed to scanline or hardware renderers). Raytracing has the advantage of simulating the way photons actually behave; although raytracing is not limited to realistic solutions.
Brazil's advanced raytrace engine simulates a wide range of effects including:
Rhino supports point, spot, directional, linear and rectangular light objects with simple properties such as colour, hotspot, and shadow casting. Brazil adds about 100 more light properties. The number of light properties can be intimidating, but most of these settings are only needed in a few specific cases.
Brazil light features include:
Brazil will also display focal cones and attenuation spheres for selected lights in the viewport, so you can see the affects of your settings in real-time.
Brazil includes non-photoreal (NPR) effects such as toon shaders.
(Car)Toon shaders cooperate with photoreal shaders so you can mix glass, brushed metal and toon in a single scene without losing the ability to do indirect-illumination, depth-of-field or any other effect.
You can specify the behaviour of fills and inks including:
Depth-of-field (DOF) simulates the imperfect focusing properties of physical lens-systems such as biological eyes and cameras. DOF adds a measure of realism to a rendering by blurring out-of-focus areas. It can also be used to "mask" areas of the scene such as distant surroundings.
The settings for DOF include:
Brazil supports both bitmap and procedural textures. Bitmap textures use images (a grid of coloured pixels). Procedural textures, on the other hand, are defined by a mathematical function. Procedural textures do not suffer from resolution or tiling problems, and it is easy to change their behaviour. Procedural textures are simulated in the Rhino viewport to make adjustments easy.
Brazil built-in functions:
Advanced definitions can be used to create other realistic materials such as wood and stone.
Brazil is a High Dynamic Range (HDR) engine. With an HDR rendering engine, colours are not limited to the black~white range. Colours can be brighter than white and darker than black. "Brighter-than-white" colours are important even though the computer screen cannot display them, because colours in a rendering are often diluted by partial reflection or refraction.
Global Illumination is a feature you will find in most modern rendering platforms including Brazil. Global Illumination uses both direct and indirect illumination to generate a realistic image. Direct illumination is the process where light objects cast light onto objects creating bright areas on surfaces that face the light source, darker areas on surfaces that do not face the light source, and shadows when surfaces cannot "see" the light source directly due to some obstruction. After a surface has been lit directly, it emits photons and some of those photons are captured by other surfaces and some of those photons are finally caught by our eyes or a camera. The effect of indirect illumination is relatively small compared to that of direct illumination. Yet, it is very important to the "realistic" quality of the image.
The advice relating to Hardware and Operating System options for Rhino3d are all relevant to anyone looking at Brazil as a plug-in rendering solution:
Rhino3d and Brazil for Rhino System Requirements
There are also some sample workstations suitable for rendering with Brazil or any of the other popular rendering plug-ins for Rhino 3d here:
Rhino3d & Rendering Workstations