BRAZIL r/s 1.2 and 3ds max 6
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BCAM
Brazil comes packaged with its own camera with its own set of features. You have numerous lens projection types including: environment mapping for creating 360 images for spherical or shrink-map environment mapping, orthographic for a view with no perspective, panorama for VR type applications, perspective emulated the native 3ds max camera, and spherical, which will create a distortion present in wide-angle spherical lenses (fish-eye).
On top of this, Brazil provides a camera wizard to quickly choose camera types when trying to match real-world cameras. Since the FOV of a camera depend on both the lens size AND the filmgate size, its very important to emulate both parameters to match the camera used on set. In 3ds max’s standard camera, the filmgate control has been sorely lacking, and not only provides problems for matching, but also creates issues in matching cameras in other programs that do have gate control (i.e., Maya).
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Displaying the many different ranges for the camera (clipping, focal distance, and environmental ranges) can get kind of messy. The Bcam gives you control over the color, opacity, and visibility of each range, so that you can adjust your viewport to you own taste. Another feature to add taste to your viewport is the fact that you have a slew of specific icons to represent your camera – SLR, Canon GL-2 with or without the LCD, Vistavision, Arricam, etc. This doesn’t add any functionality to the camera whatsoever, and probably stemmed from one too many coffees on the programmers’ parts – but it makes me smile that I can change my camera icon. It would probably impress producers who have come by to see how the shots for their project are going.
MAX LIGHTS – BRAZIL SHADOWS
Brazil r/s bled over into the 3ds max realm by allowing you to use the beauty of soft shadows and area light shadows without necessarily using and incurring the cost of a Brazil Area light. Under the standard 3ds max light shadow drop-down menu, you can choose Brazil Ray Shadows an experience the quality of ray trace shadows but the control of the softness of the edges as well as being able to emulate the shadows from an area light. You still have to render in Brazil, which goes without saying. But, if your director has decreed that you must use scanline or another renderer, and you need soft shadows, make everything in your scene a matte/shadow object, render your shadows in Brazil, and multiply 'em into the scene in comp (tip ‘o the day).
OPENEXR
For those techheads out there, you know what this is and the importance of compatibility with it. For the rest of you – openEXR is a file format that was released as open source code from the developers at Industrial Light & Magic near the beginning of this year. The format holds full-latitude data but compresses with lossless compression to manageable filesizes. Brazil r/s has always supported full-lat, but the only issue was file formats that supported it, which were limited to basically HDR and full-lat TIF files. So, it wasn’t that much of a leap of faith that the guys at Splutterfish would incorporate openEXR into the pipe. They released a free plugin available on the Splutterfish site around May that adds the .exr format selection for your images.
Now you too can enjoy making the quality of imagery spit out by ILM. Talent not included.
THINGS TO COME
Brazil r/s 2.0 is in the works. It will be released “when it is ready,” which has seemingly become the mantra for Splutterfish. The demand has been so great and people are lusting for it so hard, that the distraction has become a distraction. The programmers are deadset on creating the best product with the most bulletproof code that they can before releasing it to the public. I can’t say the same about many other software companies who seem to think that their clients should also be their beta-testers. But be assured that 2.0 will arrive. It just might be on a later train.
 | Example of new motion blur in Brazil 2.0. Click images for larger view |  |
A couple of previews (which can be viewed in the tech section of www.splutterfish.com):
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| Brazil 2.0 displacement |
I am now so accustomed to using Brazil as a tool that I don’t feel that 3ds max is complete without it. There will probably be hordes of people with torches hailing accolades for their ray tracer/GI engine of choice. But the playing field is very level and there is give and take in each direction whether you choose Mental Ray, Renderman (with MaxMan), FinalRender, VRay or Brazil.
My experience in production has proven a requirement for very fast turnarounds with a high level of quality and a reasonable pricing structure. On top of this, my time is valuable and my artists’ time is valuable, so the more time I have to spend in a tweak-render-tweak loop to make things look good, the less valuable the software is to me. Given these factors, I’ve found that Brazil r/s gives me the most bang for my buck. And I’m not the only person with this opinion.
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| Brazil 2.0 handling trillions of polygons |
For a more extensive description of Brazil, please visit www.maxinkcafe.com or www.toddsheridanperry.com for my preview review.
Todd Sheridan Perry is co-owner and VFX Supervisor of Venice, CA-based visual effects company Max Ink Cafe. His recent credits include: NCIS (spin-off of JAG), WB TV and Lord of the Rings: Two Towers. He is currently working on Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black 2 as a Technical Director. For more on Todd, click on over to www.toddsheridanperry.com and www.maxinkcafe.com.
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