Thursday, June 14, 2007

About This Site

Welcome to the Brazil r/s V2 Field Guide

Artists using Brazil r/s professionally are kicking ass throughout the CG industry. The key to this is developing both an excellent eye and the necessary skills to work with your chosen tools efficiently. The goal of this Field Guide will be to develop Brazil r/s training-style materials so that anyone willing to put in the time and dedication can become an expert Brazil r/s artist.

The approach here will be to develop training materials via this blog; posting overviews, and portions of the "course" outlines, followed by actual lessons. These lessons will probably be interspersed with breakdowns, commentary, and technical discussions that will expand upon the basic ideas being covered. That's the big plan anyway, but this approach may evolve (or devolve) as we move forward.

Brazil V2 is currently integrated with both 3ds Max and McNeel's Rhino 3d. This guide will probably jump back and forth between these different applications, but we will be making an attempt to keep the material meaningful regardless of which application you choose.

The plan is to start from an outline that requires no familiarity with 3ds Max or Rhino at all and move on into more advanced rendering topics. This blog won't provide training in modeling and animation, but it will attempt to focus on the rendering aspects of 3d applications in general.

Disclosure

CaptainVideo! is Scott Kirvan -- CEO, co-founder, and programmer at SplutterFish, LLC. SplutterFish produces the Brazil Rendering System.

More authors are expected to join in this effort and if necessary, more disclosures will be added.

Edits

Since the goal of this blog is to provide an educational resource, and not a news site with stories that reflect some moment in time, posts may be edited/updated/removed at will and at any time.

Comments

I will attempt to read every comment up here. I do read all my email, but I may not reply if you email me -- don't make any assumptions based on a non-reply, I'm just very busy.

Comments may be edited. If so, the edits will be marked with "ed." or some similar notation to make the change clear.

Not all posts will have comments -- this is intentional. Comments that are off-topic will be deleted. Comments that are replies to posts without commenting enabled will be considered off-topic and will be deleted.

In the past I've found that sometimes you have to delete a comment, even though it may not be intentionally malicious, just because it's flamebait -- I may have to do that here, and if I do, please understand that it's not done to attack you, and that what you posted may be ok if reposted in a more thoughtful or polite manner.

I may post commentary in another person's name if I get the information via phone or email. When I do that, I'll make it clear that this is what happened.

Trolls and Asshats

Asshattery will get you banned. Trolling will get you banned. The following will get you banned:

  • Knowingly posting false or malicious material;
  • multiple postings under different names;
  • generally engaging in troll-like behavior;
  • misquoting/attacking your host, your host's friends, family, or community;
  • being impolite in the extreme;
  • ad hominem attacks;
  • being an asshole.
If you have to ask yourself, "what's he mean by 'being an asshole'?", well... let's just say that you might want to avoid commenting altogether :) If you really feel the need to flame away and attack this community resource, or those involved, then please just start your own blog -- it's easy.

Disclaimer

This is not an official SplutterFish site. This is an experiment in composing, authoring, and assembling future training material in a public and open environment.