• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Events

SplutterFish's Brazil r/s 1.0

Jan 1, 2003 12:00 PM, by Chad Ashley, Optimus

Renderers are the hot topic right now. If you spend any time on web boards, you can't read five lines without seeing global illumination, radiosity, or even the cryptic HDRI. It seems every 3D package boasts a native renderer and photoreal qualities. Multitudes of independent companies are creating renderers of their own, leading to many rendering solutions for shops of all sizes. We recently used the Brazil renderer from a company called SplutterFish.

I'm the lead 3D artist for Optimus, a medium-sized post house in Chicago. I've been doing 3D professionally for about six years. At Optimus we primarily do spot work, covering everything from film transfer to graphics.

No matter the turnaround or subject matter, our clients expect more believability in our images for the same price. As the bar is raised in film, ad agencies demand the same quality in commercials. We sought the ideal renderer for a job that required more than what 3DS Max's default renderer could provide. We had to find a solution that looked great, was cost-effective, and would work within Max.

The job in question was a four-second animation for Flintstones Vitamins via BBDO, Chicago. The product was a tiny chocolate calcium chew for children. The boards showed two glasses of milk flying in from offscreen and meeting in the middle with a clink. The two glasses float in the air and then magically twist into this tiny chocolate chew. The animation was to be slightly exaggerated and very punchy, with some squash and stretch on the glasses and milk sloshing around inside. But however it moved, the client still wanted it to look as real as possible.

Our client did his own research into getting milk to look right. In fact, he even brought scientific papers downloaded from the Web that covered light and its movement through liquid. We had both read a recent article in Wired about the state of 3D rendering and the difficulty in recreating surfaces that break up light, such as milk and the human eye. The article stated that if light scattering isn't properly created or faked, you end up with a glass of chalk instead of milk.

The client did not want chalk; he wanted subsurface light scattering (SSS). He even said it by name. This kind of freaked me out, to tell the truth. It's not too often that a client is that aware of what is going on in 3D. I was, however, excited to have a reason to use software capable of that effect.

I had considered SplutterFish's Brazil from almost the beginning. I had fooled around with the free alpha versions, and I had been impressed with the image quality. Besides, I love a company that gives away free alpha software via its website and listens to its users throughout the development stages. I knew that Brazil's full-up version had SSS plus tons of other features, like glass dispersion and absorption, caustics, GI, and radiosity. Another selling factor to me was that Brazil had native lights, including area lights.

We purchased Brazil, and I went to work. After the animating was completed, I lit the scene with a combination of Brazil area lights and Brazil spotlights. Then I set up the materials. Brazil ships with several custom shaders that offer an excellent starting point. I used the Brazil Advanced Material for the milk. Within the shader are a few preset choices, such as car paint, ghost, glowworm, velvet, and wax. I chose wax because it contains an SSS setting and an extra attribute called sheen. I thought this might come in handy creating a rim light fake on the milk surface.

The milk material is actually very simple, relying heavily on lighting and the SSS, and the SSS was easy to figure out. Within the shader you have some logical attributes, such as Shallow Point, Deep Point, Shallow Color, and Deep Color. You must also specify object thickness, which is directly affected by the SSS global scale of the scene. Tweaking the global scale and the object's thickness was the most time-consuming part of the process. But even that didn't take as long as expected.

One of my favorite things about Brazil is its logical operation. Attributes have logical names and, for the most part, mean what they say, making things easier for new users. Whatever I couldn't figure out by playing around, I looked up in the online documentation on the SplutterFish website.

For the glass that surrounds the milk, I started with Brazil's Glass shader, which comes with absorption and dispersion. Absorption does just that; it recreates the affect of glass appearing darker in its thicker areas. Dispersion, meanwhile, creates a prism effect, dispersing light in a rainbow fashion. I used absorption on my glass to make it appear a little thicker and smoky at the bottom rim. I also used the Fresnel reflections and refractions. Once my reflections looked good, and the refraction looked correct, the glass was done. I didn't really have to light the glass; I just had to set up reflections that looked like lights, and it looked just right.

When it came time to render, I went with 3DS Max's native format RPF (Rich Pixel Format), which enabled me to render an image with useful embedded information. I rendered my images with the RPF velocity channel turned on, allowing me to add motion blur as a post effect in Discreet's Combustion.

I chose a post motion blur for two reasons. The first is that Brazil cannot render true 3D motion blur. It contains only a 2D vector-type motion blur, which is very unimpressive. The second reason was flexibility. I wanted to be able to increase or decrease the amount of motion blur to the client's taste on the fly.

The render times per frame were pretty fast — around four to five minutes per frame at D1 NTSC resolution. I composited it in Combustion, applied the motion blur, threw a couple of glows on it and then some film grain, and it was done. The client was very pleased.

Since this project, Brazil has made its way into just about every piece of CG we create. It should be interesting to see the features and improvements in future releases. It definitely needs to implement a 3D motion blur of some kind. It also needs to improve the speed of Brazil's depth of field. Although it is a very nice Bokeh-style depth of field, the render times increase substantially when it is used. Area light specular highlights also seem lacking. It appears that area lights create a specular highlight on only one particular kind of shader. Meanwhile, the specular highlight that it does create is very noisy when using sharp specular settings. Increasing the light's samples, it turns out, does not help. Also, Brazil does not support 3DS Max's render elements, the ability to render out separate image passes in one setup. It's a feature that comes in handy when most of your elements are passed on to compositors. I have been told that SplutterFish plans on developing something similar to this for a future release.

Brazil has raised the quality of our CG. We can now tackle just about any kind of look without a team of TDs. After testing and owning many renderers, we chose Brazil. It's affordable and easy to use with great features and amazing image quality.

Optimus is a full-service postproduction facility based in Chicago. From creative offline editing through online editing, Optimus covers every phase of the commercial making process, including film transfer, color correction, visual effects, and audio mixing — in SD or HD. Creative services include broadcast design, DVD authoring, animatic editing, and web design. For more information, call (312) 321-0880, or visit www.optimus.com.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.