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Does anybody use Brazil?


Craig Ramsay
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I was on the original FR beta team, and I've seen brazil 1.0 in action. If your talking pure speed (And I mean SPEED) vray is the only way to go.

 

http://www.3dluvr.com/crossbow/incoming/riplee.jpg

 

This is a snapshot from a 7k render. Thats 7,800x6,027 pixels.

 

5 hours baby. :)

 

Actually could get it down to about 2-3, but I put some of the settings on uber high.

 

Btw model is by riplee, textures and lighting by myself. Textures are based off one of the sweet ass darktree simbiont textures. Gotta love Darktree + Vray advanced. Its like heaven.

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I don't want to start a pissing contest here, but what Brazil version are you comparing Vray to Greg? 1.0 is much faster than the demo. Honestly I don't know which IS faster, but I am going to post a Brazil review tonight and there is a 4K image that was done (one of the models from the Sponza CHallenge site) in under 4 minutes. I thnik it may have been 1-2. Can anybody who has used both Brazil 1.0 and Vray comment on speed?

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Thing is I am not just after speed I am after quality aswell, and I seem to be able to get better results with the brazil beta than I can with FR.

 

I will upgrade to FR stage1 when it is available I just need to know how well Brazil 1 can handle big architectural scenes (the beta seems really slow)

 

Cheers

 

Craig

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Strat,

 

I compared vray to both fr stage-1 and brazil (production) and vray was faster.

 

Especially if your talking animations, because vray has the capability to do incremental irradenence maps (or however you spell it).

 

200 frames, 20 min, full GI, refraction, and caustics.

 

http://www.3dluvr.com/crossbow/incoming/torii.avi

 

Btw, I am EXTREMELY biased towards vray. :)

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ok, i got my hands on brazil...its early to judge it but i can already say a few things...

 

the support is exceptional, you can log into a support area with manuals, example scenes, live-chat with the developers, forum (not the public one).

the example scenes are great, highly useable and 'real-world', as opposed to about any other software demo scenes i know.

the manual is quite understandable for a renderer.

all in one i have the feel that the people behind brazil actually are humans, not robots (cebas comes to my mind ;)

 

i have no doubt that brazil is the best thing for tv-resolution animations. its VERY stable, i wasn't able to crash it. raytracing is faster and better looking than vray, AA is very nice but so is vrays. however AA is MUCH BETTER than with the max default scanline renderer, bump maps and complex materials look so much better...

the area light shadows quality shocked me, they look incredibly good compared to everything else i saw yet.

 

the transparent light gizmos are a great idea, its very good for tweaking, however i'd like to have real object lights.

i found the settings a bit confusing, considering that brazil is promoted as an 'artist renderer' instead of a 'nerd renderer'.

especially the GI and photon settings are confusing. and i think there is no way to vizualise the photon distribution (like with finalrender), that would be a big help.

 

speaking of GI, i think thats a bit of a weak side of brazil. direct GI looks beautyful, but its sloow. photon mapping doesn't work with skylight as far as i see, only with direct lights. the option to use skylight without indirect illumination is cool, but its still not fast enough IMHO.

 

vray's irridiance mapping IS much faster, it doesn't look as good though. something is wrong with the vray light distribution. i think there is no way around radiosity for architectual high resolution scenes, unless you can afford hours/days of rendering for a single image.

 

btw. i had no luck with vray, high res, and many lights. i had a scene where it ALWAYS crashed when cranking up the resolution (>4k). i don't like crashing renderers.

 

for outdoor-skylight-arnold-style-pics nothing beats vrays speed though.

 

i have to further test brazil's photon mapping, its not easy to use, but i don't mind tweaking. hope to get better rendertimes with photon maps + direct skylight.

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Originally posted by Craig Ramsay:

Thanks for the response guys ;)

 

It seems like there are mixed feelings about the renderers at the moment so I'm gona wait til the end of the month and get my FR-stage1 upgrade and hope that it is what I want, if not then i'll buy Brazil :rolleyes:

 

Cheers

 

Craig

You mean you are going to pay for software TWICE just to see if it will do what it was supposed to do in the first place? I would look at the alternatives first. Buy Brazil... or try the demo of Vray. That would be my advice.
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I dont like the quality of Vray the GI it produces just doesn't look correct to me.

I dont mind paying a hundred and odd pounds for an Finalrender upgrade because it could be just what I am looking for. To buy brazil or vray and find out that they are not what I want would cost much more :(

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Originally posted by Craig Ramsay:

After all that i've changed my mind and bought brazil anyway LOL :D

good...try loading the sponza demo scene (from the splutterfish user area), and watch how it renders in less than one minute...

its jaw dropping...

 

(i had no luck doing the same with my own scenes though, i'm in tweaking hell ;)

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The results look great, especially the undersampled GI scenes. But the issue i'm worried about is that the GI needs to be recalced for every angle you render from.. whereas with Radiosity you can do the upfront calculations and then render easily and quickly from every angle needed..

 

Dont know about you folks, but most of my work seems to end up as an animation at some point.. and having to recalc the lighting in every single view isn't looking very appetising to me.

 

I'm sort of waiting and hoping on finalrender to see if the Stage-1's incorporated distributed network rendering is all that the hype they're putting out is cracking it up to be.

 

(Having a fair sized farm that sits itself half idle most of the time.)

 

From what I saw on the brazil demonstrations at Siggraph, it appears to be a very high quality product, but I'm not going to drop several grand to bring the crew here up to brazil-i-zation on just hearsay and marketing speak.

 

The public beta showed a lot of promise, and helped a lot of folks, but without a real trial version to see if its what we need, or at least can use.. Dropping 1200 to test it out is not an option.

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Originally posted by Dave Buchhofer:

public beta showed a lot of promise, and helped a lot of folks, but without a real trial version to see if its what we need, or at least can use.. Dropping 1200 to test it out is not an option.

contact splutterfish to arrange some kind of demo/trial.
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  • 2 weeks later...

Ok guys I have been testing out Brazil 1.0 for the past week and it is amazing! The quality of the renders is fantastic, it is really easy to get clean renders with no artifacts :D It is also much faster than Finalrender to set up scenes BUT it is sloooow!

I had big stability problems with my computer when I installed Brazil and the distributed rendering just would not work :( The cause of the problem was that I had Finalrender on my machine, as soon as I uninstaled it Brazil worked perfectly :):):)

 

Im well happy with Brazil and over the moon that I can now render single GI frames over a network ;)

 

Thanks for all the advice guys

 

Craig

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