Tutorial: Inifite Ground Plane

Brazil provides a convenient way of producing a flat ground plane which extends in all directions to the horizon. The previous way of doing this in Brazil r/s V1 was to activate the Ground Plane in the Brazil: CSG Server from the Renderer panel. Well, that’s not how we do it anymore. New in Brazil r/s V2 is the BzPlane primitive.

Start by downloading and rendering the example scene (3ds Max 9, and Brazil r/s 2.0).


You can see that the scene contains a teapot floating in space. You will add the BzPlane primitive to the scene to create the ground plane.

Create The Ground Plane

1. Go to the Create Panel and from the Geometry dropdown, choose Brazil2 Primitives.
   
   
   

2. In the top view click and drag to create the plane.
   
   
3. Let’s add a default gray material to this and press F9 to render again.
   
   

4. The ground plane doesn’t go to the horizon by default. To change this, select the BzPlane object, go to the Modify panel and check Infinite.
   
   

5. Render again and you'll see a ground plane that stretches to the horizon.
   
   
   

Texture the Ground Plane

1. Add a checker texture to the diffuse slot of the ground plane’s material.
2. The BzPlane will automatically generate UVW mapping coordinates based on the dimensions of the plane.
3. Render the scene to see the checkers going off into the distance.
   
   
4. Expand the UVW Mapping Parameters rollout in the BzPlane’s properties. From here you can modify the UVW coordinates.
   
   
   
   

   Another way to change the dimensions of the texture is to resize or scale the BzPlane itself. For example: changing the U Tile to 2 or scaling the plane to 50% on its X-axis will give you the same result.