SplutterFish has finally unleashed Brazil r/s v1.0 upon the 3D world. In development for a year and a half, the Brazil rendering system has gotten a large interest and following from the 3ds max community through its open-testing philosophy, where users could download latest test software for their own personal testing.

It all started at Blur Studio, where Steve Blackmon and Scott Kirvan had been coding and testing various rendering technologies for production purposes. In 2000, Blackmon wrote the beginnings of a new core rendering engine with global illumination (GI) experimentation as a render effect. Called “Ghost“, the plug-in was made free for download on the Blurbeta website, a Blur Studio web repository with dozens of invaluable production tools.

Steve Blackmon and Scott Kirvan, the original founders of SplutterFish (photo: Leonard Teo, SIGGRAPH 2001)

As the 3ds max community started using Ghost, the response was phenomenal. Images poured in from all over the world -- beautiful pictures that displayed new levels of lighting and photo realism that just wasn't possible from most renderers at the time. In early 2001 Kirvan and Blackmon formed SplutterFish as the vehicle to turn Ghost (later named Brazil r/s) into a production-grade rendering system.

We speak to Scott Kirvan about the release of Brazil 1.0 and Splutterfish’s involvement in porting Joe Alter’s Shave and a Haircut to 3ds max.

3DF|CGN: Brazil has been in development for quite a while. How did the project end up sprawling out over such a long period?

Kirvan: This is really an interesting question. Actually, Brazil has only been in focused development for about a year and half. It has an extremely rich feature-set, created with modern software design methods from the ground up. Brazil has many of the same features you expect to see in high-end renderers that have been around for 10 or 15 years. From my point of view, I think it's really astonishing that something this complex was written so 'quickly', especially when you see what it can do and how stable it is, based on its performance and stability. It doesn't perform like a 1.0 piece of software. We wrote Brazil to be used in production, by people who require reliable, functional tools to do their job. As a new company, we feel it is imperative that we establish our reputation as a company with high standards, and quality software that artists can depend on.