With the release of the freely available Rio version of Brazil, the need arises for some beginner-level tutorials. My goal in this series of tutorials is to end up with a fairly complete set of instructions for those using Rio and hence not having access to the registered user knowledge base that is available to those who purchase the full version of Brazil.

This tutorial on the basics of Brazil Rio assumes you have the plugin at least installed properly and no more. I'm using max 5 in this tutorial, but i've included a few notes for max 6 users where i know there will be differences. Let's get started:

Upon starting Max, the first thing you need to do is assign Rio as your renderer. To do so, open the render dialog and then open the 'Current Renderer' rollout and poke the 'Assign' button next to the production slot. From the list choose Brazil Rio:

This will cause a pile of new rollouts to be added to your render dialog.
ATTN MAX 6 USERS: discreet decided to lock the production and material editor renderers together by default in max 6. Brazil is NOT meant to function as a MEdit renderer and as a result if you open your material editor now you should see a bunch of 'not supported' warnings. To fix this, you need to poke the little button by where you choose the renderer to unlock them and set the MEdit renderer back to scanline.

Let's go through them one by one for a brief description of what role each one plays in determining the final image that comes out.

General Options

As the name implies, this has the general settings for Brazil,

The first section, the Tools section, contains buttons (from left to right) to open the Brazil console, open the Brazil virtual frame buffer, load and save Brazil render presets, and buttons for the script-based single-frame distributed net render (although I don't think this would work in Rio due to the lack of net rendering capabilities).
The checkbox labeled 'virtual frame buffer' determines if the VFB is launched on render. The little "..." button gives you access to the handful of Brazil VFB options.

The Brazil Console (whose options are just to the right of the tools area) serves as a means of getting feedback beyond what the render dialog gives you during a render.

This can be handy if you are having problems, or and just curious as to what the renderer is doing in more detail. The amount and detail of information displayed in the console can be adjusted via the 'verbose level' spinner in the console options area. The 'auto launch' option determines if the console is automatically opened on render start and the 'clear on new frame' checkbox determines if the console gets wiped clean on each render (if unchecked, you should be able to scroll up through multiple renders worth of info).

The Bucketing Options section controls the pattern, size and order Brazil renders the buckets in a frame. The size and order drop-downs are pretty straight forward, while the buttons to the right of them may not be. The little grey box button, Bucket Interlacing, controls the interlacing options. This mean that if you are rendering in a center-out bucket order, instead of rendering is a straight spiral shape, if you have it set to the first level of interlacing, it will skip every other bucket, then return after a complete pass and fill those in. The next interlace level would give you every 4th bucket and so on. This can be very handy for getting a sample of buckets throughout a frame without having to wait for a whole frame to render. The 'R' button next to the order drop-down simply reverses the bucket order. If you are set to render left-to-right the 'R' button with make it go right-to-left, easy as that :)

In the Order drop-down menu, you may notice the option for "priority map" This will activate the priority map button (labelled 'none' by default) and let you choose a map there. This will cause Brazil to choose which buckets to render based on an image (ie lighter areas of the priority map render first). This can be useful if you render part of an image and have to stop and want to pick up where you left off at a later date.

Finally, the 'select buckets mode' button is probably one of my favorite features. With this button activated, Brazil lets you sort of paint which buckets you want it to render (on a grid) right before it starts rendering. This can be wonderfully helpful when making changes to a specific area of an image, as you can only have it render 3 or 4 specific buckets rather then a whole image. To use this, activate the button, hit render, left-click to highlight buckets and then right-click to start the render.

To the right of the bucketing options are the multithreading options. These are important if you have a dual processor machine (or perhaps a hyper-threaded one). These are simple options, allowing you to tell Brazil to use the maximum number of processors, or to run at a low-priority (slow).

Finally, the 'Miscellaneous' section has a few options as well. The left two are allowing you to change the way Brazil handles some internal sort of things and the right two allow you to enable or diable those warning dialogs you get when an object is missing maps or UV's. On a side note, the fine Splutterfish folks have improved upon these dialogs as well. If your object is missing UV's the new dialog has options to create a named selection set with just those objects...very handy!

Image Sampling

Basically this rollout has controls for two things: anti-aliasing and depth-of-field. Min and Max Samples control how many samples are taken per pixel to determine anti-aliasing. Settings of 0/0 mean one sample per pixel, i.e. no anti-aliasing at all. Settings above 0 will result in anti-aliasing and settings below 0 will result in undersampling, that is, one sample per 4 pixels, or 16 pixels, or however you have it set. Undersampling is messy and you wouldn't want to use it in a final render, but it is very handy for testing lighting very quickly. Setting the min number lower then the max will allow Brazil to adaptively anti-alias, allowing for more samples at edges and fewer samples in areas that don't need it. A good starting setting for Min/Max sampling is 0/2.

The P1, P2, and P3 buttons are quick presets ranging from low quality to high quality.

The depth of field section has all the settings for Brazil's bokeh dof. f-stop controls the amount (lower f-stop = blurrier more-exagerated dof) focal distance controls where the focus is and initial rate controls the quality (more or less). For more detailed info on what all these things do, check out the Image Sampling and Depth-of-Field tutorials.

Image / Texture Filtering

This rollout allows you to select the image filter Brazil uses to do it's anti-aliasing with. There are also controls available depending on which filter you have selected. The 2d map filtering area allows you to disable or globally change how max is filtering 2d maps (generally texture maps).

Ray Server

This rollout has controls for two areas: reflection/refraction and overall raytracing. The raytracing depth control area determines how many bounces/refractions a ray is allowed to make in after being shot from the camera. Such as if you were rendering the inside of a mirrored room, a ray without some limit would just bounce back and forth forever, resulting in extended render times ;) These limits allow you to determine what the limit should be depending on the needs of your scene. The Options area allows you to disable/enable altogether reflections, refractions, glossy reflections or glossy refractions or the whole lot at once.
The Secondary Effects Options area has toggles for Enable Self Reflect (so an object can reflect itself), Secondary atmospherics (so an object can reflect/refract atmospherics), and Secondary Material IDs (enables rendering of double fudge ice cream).
The Ray Tracing Accleration area allows modification of how Brazil traces rays on a global level. There is some wicked mojo going on in there, so i recommend just leaving it on the default setting for now, until you are thoroughly versed in Brazil, as it is very easy to slow your render to a halt or crash Max by messing with the settings contained within this area.

Render Pass Control

This area contains what Brazil has for render pass controls right now. While it is not the all-in-one solution that max tries to provide with .rpf, it does contain many very handy odds and ends. See the tutorial on render passes for more detailed info and some tips and tricks on getting what you want out of render passes. In it's current implementation, Brazil's render pass system is mostly a stopgap solution, and not as polished as the rest of the renderer. It is my assumption that a more complete and complex render pass system will be coming in Brazil 2.0.

Exposure / Color Clamping

These are controls for controlling exposure and gamma for the whole scene, controlling black and white points and for determining clipping levels for samples and render effects. These are used mostly for higher-then-eight bit depth rendering or for rendering things that have very hot hot-spots and you want them to motion-blur properly, etc. The Exposure control allows you to adjust exposure on the whole scene rather then have to adjust all your lights :)

Motion Blur

Currently Brazil is only equipped with the standard max vector motion blur, so nothing too fancy here. Basically just a few settings to determine when it applies motion blur and a checkbox to enable handling of multi-pass motion blur (max camera must be used for this).

Luma Server

This is one of the big ones! This rollout contains all the controls for all non-photon-based lighting. At the top, the 'direct illumination' area has checkboxes for enabling various light types. Enabling the skylight will turn on the skydome/ambient occlusion lighting and activate the global illumination area below. The 'indirect illumination' area to the right controls what light types are allowed to participate in secondary (bounced) illumination. There are also include and exclude lists here.

The 'miscellaneous' area has some basic controls for globally turning shadows on or off, enabling max's default light, activating enhanced bump shadows (getting shadows from bumps, mimicing displacement) and for allowing max's default lights to cast shadows.

The 'sub-surface effects' area has controls for globally turning subsurface scattering on or off (for those shaders with it activated) and global settings for scale and sample rates (these can also be controlled on a per-shader basis).

Next is the 'global illumination' area, which has all the controls for the QMC (quasi monte carlo) gi. Also below are the skylight controls. The color swatch is the color of the light (set to a sky blue by default) and there is a spot to put a map as well (perhaps an .hdr?)

For more detail on this stuff check out the 'QMC-based Global Illumination' tutorial.

Photon Map Server

This contains all the controls for photon-based global illumination, although it must be used in cooperation with the gi controls in the luma server. This also has controls for photon-based caustics. There are areas at the bottom for caching photo solutions after a render and also for saving/loading photon map files. For more details on what all this stuff does, check out the 'Photon-based Global Illumination' and 'Caustics' tutorials.

CSG Server

Finally, we come to the last new rollout, the CSG (constructive solid geometry) server. This has controls for turning on/off the csg ground plane (infinite plane), a spinner for what altitude it is and a color swatch for what it's color is. There is also a checkbox for applying a material to the plane as well as a slot for said material. Keep in mind that if you apply a material that requires mapping coordinates, the csg's scale is huge so you will need to alter the map's tiling at the material level in order to get it to display properly.

Next we move on to some other things Brazil adds to max:

The Brazil Light

You will find the Brazil light in the creation panel, under the lights button, by pulling down the menu and selecting 'Brazil R/S' from the list. There is only one light listed, but this light has many forms depending on how it is created. Click once and then again in the same spot to create an omni light. Click once and then move the mouse and click again to create a spot light. Click and drag and then click again in another spot to make a targeted area light. You may also change one type of light to any of the others (including disc area, directional, and free area and free spot).

Each light type has many options (far too many to list in this intro tut). Some high points: There are a few new shadow types, 'Brazil shadows' and 'Brazil ray shadows' The Brazil shadows will be sharp raytraced shadows with the spot and omni lights and soft shadows with the area lights. The Brazil ray shadows are ray traced as well but have a number of options as to what they will look like. Basically, if you choose the ray shadows you can choose if you want sharp shadows, shadows with soft edges or shadows that simulate one of the area light types (this can allow for parallel soft shadows with a directional light).

The light modify panel also has controls for using photometric lighting, photon-mapping, and lots of other stuff. For more info on all of this, check out the 'Brazil Light and Brazil Camera' tutorial.

The Brazil Camera

You can find the Brazil Camera in the creation panel, under the cameras button, by pulling down the menu and choosing 'Brazil R/S' from the list. The Brazil camera is similar to the max camera, with a few key differences. The Brazil camera lets you choose from a few different lens projections: Environ Mapper, Orthographic, Panorama, Perspective, and Spherical. There are also some important controls here for depth of field. For more info on all of this, check out the 'Brazil Light and Brazil Camera' tutorial.

And now....

The New Brazil Materials

Brazil/Rio comes with a handful of new materials. These are a mixture of specialized materials and general purpose materials. A brief description of each:

Brazil Advanced: This is the workhorse of the lot. This does everything that a standard max raytrace material does and also provides the framework for all the advanced shaders (skin, wax, carpaint etc). See the shader section below for more info on all of these.
Brazil Basic: This is a holdover from the public test version and functions pretty much like the raytrace material as well. There isn't much of a reason to use this one, as it is mostly here for compatibility purposes (with older scenes that use the Brazil test material).
Brazil Chrome: This one is for doing reflection-only material and is optimized to be quick about it :) This one has no diffuse component at all, so you can't put a diffuse/color map on it.
Brazil Glass: This one is for refraction-only materials (like glass), and is optimized for such. Like the chrome material, it has no diffuse component.
Brazil Toon: This is for doing various non-photo-real (NPR) effects, and has a number of different modes of shading. It can also be combined with other shaders in material-pass-through mode.
Brazil Utility: As it's name implies, this is a utility material, used in combination with other materials. This material gives you per-material control over gi send and recieve. You can also use this to control the appearance of a material to the gi engine, allowing you to, for instance, get blue bounced light from an object that renders as red.

Brazil Advanced Shaders

Inside the Brazil Advanced Material, there are a number of other spiffy shaders. They can be accessed from the little drop-down menu in the 'base shader' rollout. A brief description of each:

Brazil Default: This functions pretty much like the max raytrace material with a few additions. There are rollouts for reflection and refraction control (including toggles and spinners for glossy (blurry) versions of both) and a rollout for choosing highlight type (including a new 'sheen' type highlight).
Car Paint: A shader designed for doing metallic car paint. This has controls for candy, metallic flakes, falloff of the colors, and reflactivity. For doing car paint, it just doesn't get any better then this.
Ghost: This is a sort of opacity-based-on-light sort of shader. The areas that recieve light are more opaque, while the rest become transparent. No reflection or refraction available in this shader.
Glow Worm: This one also reacts to light, but it luminesces in the dark areas. This gives it a glow-in-the-dark look.
Lambert: This one is like the standard max material. It doesn't really do anything special.
Oren_Nayer: This uses a different shading model that produces a flatter overall lit area, good for matte surfaces.
Skin: A shader designed for skin. Features include far more controls (vs the wax shader) over how light is scattered in the sub-surface-scattering, procedural cell structure (for bump) and some skin-specific specular effects. Be sure to set this to 2-sided to get proper sub-surface scattering.
Velvet: Similar to a renderman velvet shader, this has a sheen highlight by default. Looks like velvet :)
Wax: A basic sub-surface-scattering shader, not as fancy as the skin shader, but gets the job done.

For more detailed info on the shaders as well as tips on usage, check out the "Materials and Shaders" tutorial.
Well, that wraps up the intro to Brazil Rio. Check out the other tuts for more info. :)

Questions, comments, things i got wrong? Email me at nathan@hello-napalm.com

--