Rendering basics
Having set up a virtual camera in your virtual scene, you’re ready to press the virtual shutter-release button on it and snap a virtual photo. In other words, you can render a frame!
What is rendering, really?
Rendering is a fundamental process in 3D graphics in which the artist lets the program do most of the work – simulating things like perspective, color, shadows, and reflections – the same phenomena that affect how light from the real world is sensed by our eyes or by a camera.
The rendered image should look nicer than what we see in the 3D Viewport (that’s the idea, anyway). This added quality comes at a price, however: it can take a while.
Figure 5.12: The image on the right took 20 minutes to render
Rendering can be a time-consuming process, where the artist must sit and wait for the computer to process the data and spit out each image, not always knowing what the result will be. Depending on...
