Artist Spotlight: Beans Magic Co., Ltd.

June 09, 2003 --Beans Magic Co., Ltd. based in Tokyo creates cinematics for games, television programs, commercials, and more recently, human character development. Impressed with principal Koji Yamagami's use of Brazil r/s in the incredibly life-like character studies pictured, in May we asked him about his work and here is what he told us through an interpreter at Discreet Tokyo.

SplutterFish: Please tell us a bit about your background as an artist and how you started creating animations.

Koji Yamagami: I started working in interior design and got into computer work by studying CAD. I then became interested in 3D computer graphics and four years ago I began to study 3D modeling and work as a character animator for motion pictures.

SF: How did you first hear about Brazil r/s and how long have you been working with the software?

KY: As a 3ds max user, I regularly check the HALLUCINO (http://www.maxuser.com/) site here in Japan, which offers comprehensive 3ds max-related information. I read some information about Brazil r/s at HALLUCINO, downloaded the public test version, and tested it.

I purchased Brazil r/s approximately three months ago while I was creating this character and have been impressed with its ability to render photorealistic images. One of the real benefits is that I can still use the base functions in 3ds max and work as I normally do. In other words, I don't have to change the way I work in order to use Brazil r/s.

SF: Some of the human character images that we have seen are amazingly photorealistic. What qualities in the Brazil Rendering System enabled you to achieve this level of realism?

KY: I would like to ask you in reverse; how did you make a tool that has such nice rendering quality? Having tested many Global Illumination renderers, I came away with the impression that the Brazil Rendering System provided superior photorealistic images. I think the combination of Brazil r/s's fast and correct Global Illumination calculation and the ray tracing refraction features were able to highlight the quality of the image.

SF: Can you provide a brief summary of the 'mamegal' project? What were some of the rendering challenges you faced in creating this character?

KY: This character is being developed for Discreet Tokyo. I was really focused on creating a beautiful character, and one of the most challenging aspects of the project was creating the character in a very short amount of time. There was a total of about a month, but in reality, there was only about two weeks to complete the work.

Brazil r/s's speed and the ease in adjusting parameter settings were very helpful in being able to finish the project under a severe deadline. Another tough challenge was the rendering for the poster size. It took 7 minutes to render an 800 x 600 image, but took several hours to render a 6K image.

SF: We understand you have also used the Brazil r/s Toon shader. Could you share your impressions with us?

KY: I have used other toon renderers in the past for a job on a TV program, which was a composite of a cel animation. I used a different 3D package/renderer combination back then, and was looking for something similar to use in 3ds max. So far, I am only testing the new Brazil r/s Toon shader, but find that even when rendering many polygons, the anti-aliasing works well and is quite stable. It rendered this image in 1 minute and 30 seconds, which is very fast.

SF: You have commented previously that "Brazil r/s is a very stable, fast, and very high quality rendering system." Are there any other cool features or comments you would like to make about using Brazil r/s in a production environment?

KY: I haven't been using Brazil r/s for very long, but I am quite satisfied with the results so far. It is stable and I get the results I expect. Remarkably, I haven't experienced any crashes! When using Global Illumination in general I have found previously that it is sometimes difficult to match/merge the texture mapping. But with Brazil r/s, surprisingly, they fit the map. Oh, and although I did not use it on this project, I have noticed that the Brazil r/s's caustics and skin shaders are fast, too. I would like to continue testing them and to use them in other projects as well.

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