With all the "cool" features of Brazil like DOF and GI, lets not forget some of the more meat and potatoes advantages it has as well. For example, no matter how many things I'd tell this one co-worker about Brazil, he only had one question on his mind, "when are we going to get those clean bump maps?" For people who've used other renderers such as Renderman or Lightwave, you may know what I'm talking about, Max has always had a problem getting crisp bump maps. If you increase their strength so they read better, they get all jaggie. To get rid of the jagginess, you end up reducing their intensity until it no longer looks like the effect you're trying to achieve. Although bitmap filter has not been looked at yet in the current version of Brazil, just the way the renderer antialiases the image makes up a big part of how a bump map reads. In Brazil, antialiasing is done by increasing the samples.

This is an example of a tire tread using the standard max scanline renderer. Amount is set to 200, Summed Area filtering, a blur of 1.0.

To try and clean up the jaggies, I turned super-sampling on, increased the blur to about 1.5, and reduced the intensity (amount of about 100). The results look better.

But now, I go back to my original material, and render with Brazil, image samples set at min3. Take a close look and see how it stays smooth, but retains an element of the crispness of the first image.

I'd like to thank Brandon Davis for suggesting this example, and the file I used comes on the max CD and it's called AnisotropicWhell.max, if you want to play with it yourself. I'd also like to thank a person who posted a similar example of a wheel tread on the BlurBeta forum for some inspiration, however, I'm afraid I forgot exactly who it was. If you can write me, I'll put your name in here as well.