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Award winning Brazil r/s is a rock-solid, advanced, fully-integrated rendering suite for Discreet’s top-selling animation software 3ds max and Autodesk VIZ.

Developed in a production environment, Brazil r/s is engineered to be a stable, reliable production tool. Its thoughtfully designed, intuitive interface offers uncompromising control and flexibility. Brazil

r/s is packed with the features that animators want most. Its unmatched, production proven lighting and rendering technologies offer fast, accurate photorealistic results.

Brazil r/s works directly in 3ds max to achieve integration of tools, materials and lighting; enabling artists to work faster than ever before. Brazil allows you to create complex shaders without writing any code or using advanced text editing programs like Photoshop. Material presets are easy to apply making it simple for anyone working in 3D to take advantage of state-of-the-art rendering capabilities. Thousands of preset materials are available out-of-the-box including Autodesk VIZ style material templates created by professional designers at The Art Institute of California – San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. Artists can use Brazil r/s as a plug-in by connecting it to 3ds max or as a stand alone rendering solution from the command line using any of today’s most popular image formats.

A streamlined workflow allows you to create production quality images with just a few clicks. Perfect for architectural and product visualization, digital matte painting and design visualization, lighting sets fast with auto exposure routines and features shadow catcher support for creating accurate shadow maps in VIZ. Render time is greatly reduced thanks to instancing capabilities found throughout the program including object instancing, material instancing and terrain instancing. Additional speed improvements come from procedural texturing, level of detail (LOD) rendering, surface modifiers and fast geometry display options.

Additional features include: raytraced stereo rendering, render to geometry, render caching and multilanguage support for English and Japanese. An updated color management system helps you achieve faster turnarounds by allowing multiple users access to the same project through network rendering over a LAN. Artists can work simultaneously on projects without having to wait in line; using Brazil r/s’ “render anytime” feature that allows artists real-time rendering capabilities while another artist is already rendering in 3ds max. With an intuitive matching interface like Photoshop’s “Match Color,” you can completely automate the process of correcting lighting and exposure throughout all your renders with just one click.

Brazil r/s supports native files created using RenderMan Pro Server or RIS, allowing the exchange of geometry, shading, lighting and texture information between 3ds max and RenderMan compliant rendering software.

Brazil r/s also supports other standard file formats including Autodesk VIZ (.iv), JPEG (.jpg), Photoshop (.psd) TIFF (.tif), PNG (.png), OpenEXR (.exr) and many more. The supported renderers include: Mental Ray for Maya, Pixar’s RenderMan Pro Server, Chaos Group’s V-Ray for 3ds max, Maxwell Render for C4D and modo with BMRT support.

Brazil was originally developed in 1998 by Randy French as a DOS program called DrPath that allowed users to render using NewTek’s LightWave 3D without leaving their Windows applications. The program was then expanded to include other 3D programs, and in March 2000 French founded Brazil r/s Pty Ltd under the name “Brazil” (with no space).

In October 2004 the company released Brazil r/s for Autodesk’s 3ds max. In January 2005 they began shipping a version for Discreet’s 3ds max. In April 2008 they transitioned from a DOS executable to a plugin which allows the software to render within the host application without a separate window or process. They also added support for Maya and Softimage XSI versions of mental ray through RenderMan compliant plugins. In September 2008 they announced that “Brazil” would be open sourced under an MIT license with all non-commercial features being free.

In September 2010, they released Brazil r/s 10 which included a redesigned interface that allows users to work with multiple scenes in viewports across one or more monitors. The new “Viewport Preview Renderer” was designed to optimize the use of GPU rendering for final frame previews by using pixel shaders in Microsoft’s DirectX 9. With Viewport Preview Rendering enabled, you can see near photorealistic results while interactively navigating complex scenes on modern graphics hardware making real-time decisions about lighting, look-dev and materials. In July 2013, it was announced at SIGGRAPH by Autodesk that Brazil r/s would be flagged as an Autodesk recommended plug-in for 3ds max.

Features:

  • Physically accurate lighting for fast clean results–in addition to standard max lights, several custom Brazil lights are ideal for those with demanding lighting requirements
  • Blazingly fast ray-tracing, and highly-evolved anti-aliasing and filtering.
  • Advanced GI algorithms that produce crisp, detailed output.
  • Carefully engineered memory/cpu pipeline easily renders large data sets (multi-millions of polys)
  • High-performance materials–car paint, wax, glass, skin and more
  • Sophisticated photon mapping and caustics.
  • Innovative camera tools to match real-world cameras and lenses.
  • Versatile Brazil Toon™ shading that’s capable of infinite looks.
  • Pure, multi-threaded, highly scalable, full-latitude floating-point operation.
  • Handling of 3ds max scene files natively; unparalleled compatibility with third-party plugins.
  • Support for REYES and scanline rendering.
  • Pre- and post-render scripts.
  • Batch processing capabilities, including noise reduction and render farm support.
  • Viewport preview rendering–realtime interactive walkthroughs of scenes with photorealistic output at the click of a button (requires Viewport 2.0)

DirectX 9 pixel shaders can be used to speed up final frame previews on supported graphics hardware.
A powerful expression engine that enables users to drive any aspect of their scene using real-world mathematical principles
Thematic problem solving environment simplifies tasks like changing the day on which a shot is supposed to take place or flattening geometry onto tiling textures so it tesalates seamlessly along animated paths allowing artists to quickly explore AOVs and shot variations.
Brazil r/s 10 introduced the ability to create, edit and save named rendering presets with custom settings that can be used across any project or shared among co-workers. It also added support for caustics, letting artists add accurate light effects such as water reflections and refractions for free.