Scott Davidson's Blog (14)

Brazil for Rhino!

For me, this is a wonderful addition to Rhino - a great render! Very controlable and also very simple to use if some of it's basics are understood. I hope to cover some of these basics and procedures with tutorials and materials demonstrating their use.

A Brazil Material Library.

This is a 'Standardized' scene which can be used as the basis of a Library of Materials for Brazil 4 Rhino. A good, comprehesive material…

Procedural Textures

Repeating patterns based on numerical formulas.

If you have any confusions on what these are, do a search and read a little about them on the web. Simplified - computer generated patterns mimicking real-world materials such as stone, wood, marble, etc.

Procedural Textures are your friends!

They wrap around your objects seamlessly (if they are the 3D type) and can add some wonderful looking visual effects…

Gradients

My history as an artist/illustrator contains heavy useage of the airbrush for creating different visual effects. The airbrush mostly does one thing ...and it does it extremenly well - it creates gradients. This quick tutorial will cover using the Gradient Texture to transition from one material to another. And, it will give me a chance to mention a few settings I personally like when using the toon material.

Noise is also used to transition…

What's it all about?

This "Getting Started Guide" is intended for the Rhino user unfamiliar with advanced rendering programs such as Brazil. If you are fluent when it comes to industry standard rendering technologies, you will certainly breeze through the explanations included. If you are new to Brazil and advanced rendering, much of the learning process will come down to absorbing new terminology such as "Global Illumination" and "Render Cache". Once you have…

Unless the scene you are creating is full of great objects and a broad dynamic range of lighting to reflect, there is a good chance it will look and feel like it is missing something. Mine tend to border on being called Homely looking!:-)

Here's Homely!

Here are a few materials - a fairly basic glossy chrome blend with a little noise and some 'default' glass - assigned to some objects with the idea the scene should look good ......at least…

Quick Results

This is geared toward someone just getting a feel for Brazil and won't attempt to cover much more than a basic procedure - it is where I always start when-ever I'm creating an image in Brazil though.

There are lots of controls in Brazil - many places to get lost and also many places to foul up in if you aren't quite sure of what you are doing. Most rendering engines are like this so Brazil isn't particularily more difficult than anything else -…

Alternate Materials

These are some alternate Paint and Lacquer materials imbedded in this orignial 'swoosh' scene. It contains a variation on the environment and the exact settings I used to produce the image - I thought maybe some could use that as a starting off place for their own experimentations and renderings.

Here is the file:…

Brazil is:

• A great rendering engine, but not the only great rendering engine.
• Tightly integrated with Rhino, but not easy to master.

User Galleries

Example Image

This image was rendered in Brazil for Rhino, and it shows advanced features that you will not find in simpler rendering platforms such as the Rhino renderer or Flamingo:



The five details…

Sampling

Sampling creates an approximation of a continuous data source by taking measurements at specific intervals.

Since when rendering an image, we cannot represent details smaller than one pixel, the solution for measuring the color of the pixel is to measure the color at the center of every pixel in the rendering and then to assume that this color is a reasonable average for the entire pixel.…

Introduction to the Brazil shader system

What are shaders?

In Brazil, everything that makes a visible impact on a rendering is referred to as a shader. This includes lights, environments, materials, textures, and camera lenses. Shaders are predefined behavioral patterns that affect the rays during the raytracing process.

Imagine raytracing a single pixel during a rendering. The process is something like this:

1. A ray is shot from the…

Brazil Rendering System Options

This page lists most of the options that are available in the Brazil for Rhino plugin. There is a brief explanation of the purpose and effects of each one. Since Brazil for Rhino is not yet completed, some options have not been implemented at this stage.

Options

The Brazil options dialog can be opened via the Brazil menu, in which case you get a modeless dialog. It is also possible to access the options in a modal way through the…

This tutorial is an explanation of techniques for rendering jewelry models in Brazil for Rhino. This process is similar to rendering other types of products with the additional use of features such as caustic photons and custom index of reflection and refraction values. You can download the tutorial file used to create the renderings and screen shots shown to help you learn…

The following example provides one way to use Brazil r/s 2.0 for Rhino and while there are many possibilities when it comes to rendering in Brazil, this method is a simple one in which photo realism can be achieved with minimal effort. Here's the Rhino scene we'll be working with...

You'll need the following files to render this scene yourself...…

Brazil r/s 2.0 for Rhino

Using the Brazil Render Cache with Auto Occlusion for fast renderings.

The following will show you how to use the "Auto Occlusion" option in the "Render Cache" section of Brazil. The above examples rendered in Brazil beta 20 are available for you to download in order to try these settings on your own computer. This technique is especially…