How does making a 3D model on my computer put so much strain on it, but rendering it in real time alongside a hundred copies of it in a video game work perfectly fine? Moreover, how does it take so long to render something that was already being shown and worked on?

Question

Hope this doesn’t count as a ‘loaded question’.

In: Technology

Answer 1

Your computer is working hard to figure out where all of the little triangles should actually be. It needs to make sure that they don’t overlap, nothing is inside of the solid and so on. It’s not spending much time actually rendering it.

By comparison video games have already precomputed all of the stuff that matters, and some of it doesn’t even matter (like having points or vertexes inside solids). All it needs to do is actually draw the triangles that have been precomputed. Also games tend to use a lot fewer triangles than you think with textures to hide this.

Once your model actually renders, try rotating it on screen. That should be pretty snappy, right? That’s analogous to what video games are doing.