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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Depending on the medium the artist works in, rendering can mean different things.
If you work with a classic medium, such as charcoal, paint, or pencils, rendering is using shadows and highlights to give your artwork a 3D effect. If I want to draw a ball, I could just draw a circle on a page, but if I want the ball to look round then I will leave the ball white where the light hits it, then make a gradient that gets darker and darker and you get away from the light spot, then I’ll draw a shadow underneath the circle.
If you work in a digital medium, rendering is the output function used to make your artwork look good. The more things you have in your file, the longer it will take the computer to render your artwork. You can put “lights” into the project you are working on to make your project look real. For instance, if I make a haunted house for a video game, I could set up one light to act like the sun and light everything up, or I could add a bunch of spot lights to light up certain windows. It takes a lot of computing power to make those lights, so while I’m in “editing” mode, you won’t see the lights. When I’m ready to show off my work, I’d use the render function to create an image where you see how the lights make my building look more realistic.
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