In issue 102 of 3D World, Uniform‘s Nick Bentley and Sam O‘Hare review Brazil r/s 2.0, SplutterFish‘s powerful third-party 3ds Max renderer. In the review, Nick and Sam discuss the results of their comparative rendering tests: a still GI interior and an animation test. However, no single test scene can represent the full range of conditions in which a renderer will be used. Different artists will also choose to adjust individual render settings differently.
In order for you to be able to determine whether Uniform‘s tests and test settings reflect the conditions in which you would use Brazil; and for you to be able to make your own comparisons with other render engines such as finalRender or mental Ray, we have provided the scene files and test renders for download below.
UPDATE (May 2008)
This review generated long threads on both the Brazil r/s V2 Field Guide and CGSociety.org, centering around the issue of the relative render times for a ‘typical‘ GI interior scene in Brazil r/s and V-Ray.
The technical details are too complex to summarise adequately here, but you can read Scott Kirvan from SplutterFish‘s full response to the review in his Field Guide blog posting.
While we stated in the review that no single test can adequately reproduce a full range of production conditions, and that readers should download the test files in order to make their own comparisons of render time versus render quality, we accept that the way in which a scene is set up is central to the issue.
Accordingly, we invited SplutterFish to discuss the best-practice workflow for Brazil r/s in more detail in issue 105 of 3D World. In the magazine, Michiel Quist of Netherlands-based visualisation studio 3idee provided a three-page walkthrough for rendering an interior scene. You can download supporting files for the tutorial below.
Download the tutorial files
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