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Brazil is:

  • A great rendering engine, but not the only great rendering engine.

  • Tightly integrated with Rhino, but not easy to master.

 
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 highlighted in this image represent an advanced feature:(1) Raytracing, (2) Advanced lighting, (3) Toon rendering, (4) Depth of field, (5) Procedural textures.

 

Raytracing

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:

 

  • Reflection

  • Refraction (transparency)

  • Dispersion (prismatic rainbow effects)

  • Sub-surface scattering (diffuse light transmitting materials such as wax or skin)

  • Glossy reflections (blurry or brushed materials)

 
Advanced lighting

Rhino supports point, spot, directional, linear, and rectangular light objects with simple properties such as color, 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:

 

  • Decay (darkening of light as a function of distance to the source)

  • Attenuation (amplification of brightness as a function of distance to the source)

  • Focus control (rectangular, conical, cylindrical etc.)

  • Projections (emitting a picture or procedural texture instead of a color)

  • Exclusion lists (lights ignore specified objects in the scene)

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.

 

Toon and NPR

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:

  • Multi-level paint fills (discrete colors applied based on luminosity)

  • Gooch type fills, (continuous gradient)
     

Depth of Field

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:

  • Focus distance

  • Radius

  • F-stop

  • Bokeh abberations (the effect over-exposed areas in an image have when they are out of focus)

Depth of Field Details

Rhino viewport screenshot. Brazil materials can be simulated and displayed in the real-time viewport.

Brazil rendering with no DOF effect. Everything is in focus.

Depth of field enabled.

DOF with focal distance aimed at the first glass.

The middle glass is in focus. The depth-of-field effect blurs both objects in front of and behind the field.

Procedural Textures

Brazil supports both bitmap and procedural textures. Bitmap textures use images (a grid of colored 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 behavior. Procedural textures are simulated in the Rhino viewport to make adjustments easy.

Brazil built-in functions:

 

  • Checker

  • Dots

  • Gradient

  • Marble

  • Noise

  • Tile

  • Wrinkled

 

Advanced definitions can be used to create other realistic materials such as wood and stone.

 

High Dynamic Range colors

Brazil is a high-dynamic-range (HDR) engine. 

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