Brazil - Rendering for the CG Artist - Academic Single License (Download)

Raytracing Materials

Brazil's render engine uses the raytracing method. Raytracing has the advantage of simulating the way photons actually behave; although raytracing is not limited to realistic solutions it delivers some of the most photorealistic images available on any platform available today.

Advanced lighting

Point, spot, directional, linear, and rectangular light objects with simple properties such as color, hotspot, and shadow casting are supported. 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.

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)

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. 

Some 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.

With an HDR rendering engine, colors are not limited to the black~white range. Colors can be brighter than white and darker than black. "Brighter-than-white" colors are important even though the computer screen cannot display them, because colors in a rendering are often diluted by partial ref