I hear the term “rendering” thrown around in both traditional and digital art communities like it’s some sort of buzzword, but I’ve never gotten a clear explanation as to what it means.
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The general definition of rendering is to turn some kind of raw input into something more produced.
For a traditional artist, this might mean turning a rough concept that was written in text or only spoken about into a drawing or painting.
When a digital artist (usually 3D) says this, what they mean is that the software they’re using is going to take the raw computer data that (such as 3D coordinates generated from the 3D model) and turn that into a visual image. This can be done like a game which does some fancy math tricks to fake things like perspective and lighting, or it can be done with ray/path-tracing which involves shooting out a bunch of simulated light rays and tracing them around the scene to get realistic lighting.
**EDIT**: Funny story from when I used to freelance as a 3D artist. One day I was contacted by a company that wants me to make an animation “for their rendering machines,” so naturally as a 3D artist my brain is picturing the computer servers used for quickly processing 3D renders. I’m on a video call with the guy showing him my past work and stuff, and I show him some of my rough sketches for what I was thinking and he immediately looks confused and was like “those won’t do,” and when I asked what his vision for the animation was he goes “basically we need to show meat going in one side and the processed result coming out of the other.” After struggling to picture why someone would be shoving raw meat into a computer, my brain finally realized that “meat rendering,” is a thing and it had nothing to do with computers at all 😂. Ended up [animating a bunch of big ass meat processing machines for them](https://www.dupps.com/materialhandling.html).
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