Hello, I’m a long-time user of Rhino3D and Brazil. I purchased Brazil 1 and 2 for their unique layered options structure. I use Brazil 2, VRay 5, and the Rhino render engine, but for the final rendering, I use Brazil 2.
Having been away, I just got back to Rhino 7 with Brazil 2 and found that some of the options given in the material editor are missing. I reinstalled Rhino 6 and 7 with Brazil 2, and it’s still the same. In the past, I got results that were totally lifelike.
For example, when I want to create a pearl material, I click on the arrow next to “Diffuse,” a new options page opens with the “Brazil Angular Blend” option, among other choices.
My style of art is layered, and Brazil 2 was perfect for this. Yes, it’s not as sexy as VRay or Blender, but sometimes, sexy is not as good as the old-fashioned method.
I can’t understand why, with a fresh installation of both Rhino and Brazil 2, some options for Brazil 2 were taken away even when installed from a CD. It’s as if I’m being forced to move away from Brazil 2. For example, when wanting to create a pearl material, I click on the arrow next to “Diffuse.” The only options I get are color picker or copy color.
Why was Brazil 2 ruined?
I mean Brazil has been dead since before V7, I don’t know if it’s even supposed to work in V7.
I guess I still have it installed on my V7, but I don’t even see “Pearl” as one of the built-in Brazil material types and don’t recall it ever being one, but the Advanced Material and Advanced Blend material and “Angular Blend” stuff is all there to make them as complex as you want, I don’t see anything missing. Maybe you just need to enable the “advanced” settings? I remember that pointless option.
When I, for example, used Advanced Materials, I could assign a texture to the geometry after choosing Advanced Materials. Then, I could select Angular Brazil Blend; after setting the angle, I could pick Brazil Porcela Material, and so on. Right now, all I can do is choose a texture to embed into the material. The ability to create complex, multiple-layered materials has been removed. With Brazil 2, it was simple but powerful; even installing the software from the CD didn’t help.
Brazil was also my favorite back in V5 and V6.
A shame it was dropped, for sure.
But what is missing? I can do all that. My most complicated old Brazil models still render.
And there’s some rose-colored glasses going on, the interface for making these complex materials was AWFUL.
Y’all don’t remember what happened?
The makers of Brazil were bought out by a company that was into GPUs for phones, and it was left to die as the rendering market is irrelevant compared to that world, it was just to collect some patents, and then there were the whole “Caustic Graphics and Neon” experiments that never quite worked out and were possibly never intended to (again because this whole market is pocket change compared to phones.) And THAT was like 10 years ago, Brazil itself was a zombie by that time.
I still have the Caustic accelerator card I got for promotional purposes somewhere…oh here it is.
Hey @Zvi_Orenstein,
The last service release of Brazil 2 was published way back in 2013.
If you want to keep using it, I suggest running it in either v5 or v6.
— Dale
Can you post images of the effect you are looking for in your materials? We can’t do anything about the frustration of legacy features/products that had favored workflow, but we can try to help with the tools available.
Thanks for the quick history lesson. Interesting.
I’d love to be able to buy some kind of RT-only accelerator for rendering today. Even though some kind of RT-core only chip wouldn’t be that difficult, there is no way Nvidia would allocate resources for it, given the small market that designers and artists make up.
I tried Brazil a bit back then. I remember I did like how the settings menu was structured.
Well it was a thing that was only going to exist in a certain transition era like back when “floating point coprocessors” were a thing. It was pretty expensive, was utterly missing certain small but expected rendering features, and there were quirks like while it let my desktop run circles around a dual Xeon monster, putting it IN the dual Xeon monster actually slowed it down.
It’s amazing how far and fast CPUs came as a result of the AMD/Intel contest after Skylake.
I looked into a Dual Xeon X99 render server to move the workload from my Intel 13700K. But the throughput on the 13700K is so high, that it happily trounces most (even all?) HEDT CPU combinations from that era, including some from the previous generation Threadripper.
It would be nice to have more graphics-oriented Nvidia GPUs with the Tensor Cores and replaced with more CUDA and RT cores, but that won’t happen given Nvidia have mostly lost interest in actual graphics nowadays, especially at the consumer level.
The Raytracing cores in my Arc A770 really suprised me as to how fast they are for a “first” gen consumer GPU. Very good in Blender.
It seems a long time ago when I was on old scifi/hobby 3D forums; if you were really special, you used either Brazil or Maxwell rather than inferior scanline or Mental Ray. Leaving PCs on for 5 days just to get a still.