Brazil or Flamingo

What application should I purchase? I will be attempting to photo-realistically render automotive lighting devices in the lit and unlit conditions.

My plan is to import ray files from a 3rd party ray tracing software for the lit condition. The benchmark that we are trying to meet is an Optis rendering.

Hi js,

It sounds like you’ll need a very realistic light simulation. I would suggest using photometric lights in Brazil and also checking out the Maxwell plugin. You can speed up renders using irradiance mapping techniques in Brazil but if your main goal is realistic light you won’t want to cheat for faster renders IMO, go with Maxwell if you agree. A third option that is non-biased to consider is Octane although I’m not sure about photometric data in that one. All of these are available as demos so try before you buy.

JS,

I use both Brazil and Maxwell almost daily. Brazil is a great render engine in many respects, but if it’s truly photographic quality renders you need, then Maxwell is the better/best choice. I can’t comment on Brians suggestion of Octane as I haven’t tried it out (yet), but note it’s GPU based, so you’ll need a rather expensive video card(s) to run properly.

Although Maxwell produces some spectacular results (check out their galley pages), it can be slow, you’ll need a hi-end PC/workstation, and network rendering comes as standard (Maxwell 3 comes with network 10 nodes).

I concur with Brians suggestion, you’d be best to demo each of the packages and decide from there. Good luckin whatever you end up choosing.

Alan

Between Flamingo and Brazil i sure prefer Brazil.
But Brian is right, for more realistic simulation Maxwell it’s the best.
I would add to the list Vray, I did some work on automotive lighting with great result.
And with RT options you can check different lighting conditions very fast (none of the other does the same :wink:

i’m sure
brazil VS flamingo?
brazil wins for several reasons!

the best rendering engine choice as V5 plugin?
surely Vray
reason N1–>support and users-help(cause it’s the first Render Engine in the world,under many platforms,rhinoceros,3Dstudio,Maya)

Sorry to throw in a third option but I would go with Vray for Photorealistic results.

Though I have to admit the real work horse in my office is Flamingo NXT, it just that its lighting isn’t quite as good.

Octane will give you an unbiased render, so physically accurate - but I’m not sure about the photometric data either. I know you can assign IES light data to emitters if that’s any help. The demo version is available at http://render.otoy.com/downloads.php.

Paul

Hey Paul, any thoughts of incorporating HDR Light Studio into Octane 4 Rhino?