What is Brazil r/s, what happened to Ghost, and what about RayFX?
Our work with raytracing started with RayFX in 3ds Max. RayFX has been in development with its current architecture since about 1996. The original version of RayFX actually worked in max 1.2, but you wouldn’t have wanted to try and use it in production at that point. While the idea of a shader level (scanline hybrid) raytracer seems obvious now, back then it was a pretty new idea and provided a way to get raytracing into max’s scanline renderer. Blur Studio licensed RayFX to Autodesk and it was included in max as the “raytrace” material and texmap. As development progressed on RayFX and as production needs required more and more from the core technologies of RayFX, it became increasingly clear that there are severe limitations to squeezing advanced rendering features into the scanline renderer. Our experimentation with rendering technologies led to something known briefly as the “advanced material,” but that material quickly outgrew the inherent limitations of running as a sub-system t
