Brazil Basics: Reflection Control and the Brazil Utility Material

Here's a little example showing the practical use of a few of Brazil's many, many settings.

I've been doing simple studio-type renderings like this of concepts for a client. Not concepts of sinks, but it will do. It's lit using the skylight and a single bright panel, with Global Illumination enabled but with just a couple bounces. The background is a gradient, but this would all work the same if I was using an HDR environment or whatever. The colors are intentionally 'odd' to highlight what's going on.
So what we have is the object on a plain, partially-reflective background. I used the Reflection Decay option under the Reflection Parameters on the floor to fade out the reflected sink. The floor is a Brazil Plane Primitive, set (not in the lower shot of course) as infinite.
So assuming this looks okay, the problem is that I want a pure white background.
To force the floor to be pure white, I did two things:

• In the reflection parameters of the floor material, went to the Basic Reflection Control and checked the box labeled "Env:" This lets you set a different color or material for the environment the object is reflecting. I set the color to white.
  
• Increased the Diffuse multiplier in the default material settings. The problem of course is that the shadow and reflection are 'blown out,' and it's lighting up the sink, which might be perfectly realistic, but this is not exactly about "realism."
  

This is where the Brazil Utility Material comes in. If we place the floor material inside a Brazil Utility Material, we can tweak, among many other things, the amount of lighting it emits and receives from global illumination. To do this, I created a Utility Material and assigned it to the floor object, then inserted the old floor material into the Base slot of the Basic material overrides section. I then scrolled down to the Global Illumination Parameters and reduced the Level and Saturation values for generating and receiving GI.

To completely remove the reflection of the pure white floor from the sink(which is not very realistic of course, but just to illustrate what you can do,) I went back to the Basic Material Overrides and inserted into the Reflected slot a copy of the original floor material, minus the adjustments.

Finally, to make the 'sky' pure white(with quicker render time than making the ground plane infinite again)I made a Single Color Texture and set it to white. I opened up the Environment section of the main Brazil settings panel, and inserted the texture into the Planar background slot of the Global Maps overrides. You can see it has no effect on the environment reflected on the object.
Here I switched the sink to a glass material and adjusted the ground plane to show the effect of the planar background setting.
With the planar background override turned on, you can see it has no effect on what's refracted or refracted in the glasss.
I posted a question about this on the Brazil support forum, thanks to Paul Sherstobitoff.

Simulation of a Prototype Part II

Here's a shot of a new iteration of the SLS Brazil material, the noise has been made 'bigger' and I tried to get more of a hint of the layer structure in the more vertical areas.

A simulation of a prototype

I thought I'd try to make a Brazil material to approximate Selective Laser Sintering. Without some sort of actual displacement(which Brazil supports of course, though I'm not sure if that's even the answer to creating the 'stepped' appearance of the flatter areas of a rapid prototyped part, maybe it's best to simply brute-force turn the model into many many thin slices...)it's not going to look convincing up close, but at arm's length it's not too bad, the biggest problem with this shot being that the bumpiness on the rounder parts is too smooth and subtle. If I develop it a little more I might post a tutorial about it.

Revamping the website

I've been redesigning the hydraulicdesign.net site and have a test version posted. The content is not complete, the design needs tweaking, some of the images are placeholders or haven't been scaled so the load times may be insane...so essentially it's not done at all, but the new order form setup, which is the important part, does work and I'd like to hear comments. UPDATE: I just went live with it.

Flamingo 2

McNeel haven't made their official announcement yet, but (I am nonetheless authorized to say)that it is shipping now. The upgrade is $100 off for a limited time. See the order forms.

LG W2600H-PH first impression

Why is it so hard to find reviews of monitors? All my usual sources of hardware advice spend all their time on things like motherboards and RAM, taking 20 pages comparing products that perform within 2% of each other.

I picked this up yesterday primarily because it was on sale at Future Shop. My old LCD, which was my first LCD, is a 2004 vintage 20" Viewsonic VP201s, so I'm looking for something bigger. The 25.5" LG W2500H is certainly a nice size, and it does do a better job at DVD playback, but otherwise it's rather disappointing. I guess it wasn't a good sign to find that it only came with an analog cable, what sort of miserable bean-counters decide to ship a monitor in 2008 without a bloody DVI cable?

I knew there had to be a reason why it's half the price of something like the only slightly bigger Samsung 275T--and indeed not far from half what my old LCD cost new--but I guess I was expecting to see more progress in four years than simply being cheaper and bigger. Compared to my 4-year-old monitor, the viewing angles are worse and the colour...oh, the colour. It's shocking how bad it is. It's like a jumbo version of a cheap laptop panel. Wait, no, I'm writing this on a cheap laptop and it's capable of showing a bright red as red, not hot pink.

If I keep it it will only be because nothing else in the same size and price range would be much better, at least I can still use my old LCD for anything where colour matters.

Recent Project

Lately I've been working quite a bit with with the marketing firm Lulham Black on bottles for various household products for Simplicity Clean.

Accelerated Rhino Training

The standard Rhino Level I and II training courses are each scheduled for three days. What I've found through recent experience is that, at least for small groups, two days is quite adequate, so that's less time off work for you or your employees. Level III training, based on my own material, can also be squeezed into two days, it's a matter of focusing on your needs.

I can come to your office or you can travel to Ottawa, Ontario. Contact me for more information.

Are you going to be in Berlin this April?

A German Rhino reseller, Visual-Dream, is presenting a Rhino-centred 3D modeling symposium from April 7-9 at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Among the participants will be yours truly, putting on an advanced modeling "master class" about using Rhino for concept development.

A question for Canadian visitors

My credit card processing provider has recently made available the option for Canadian customers (only, at this time) to pay for orders by debit card, through a process that involves logging on to your own online banking site. Would this be an attractive feature?