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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A quick google tells me that it is about “generating” a picture or 3d-model based on data that was set up beforehand
If I’m not mistaken it’s like telling the computer how ti draw the model and then depending on the processing power of the computer it follows these instructions to draw your model
If you don’t have the necessary power it simplifies by removing certain drawing aspects to make the drawing “blurry” by removing details but keeping the whole idea going
Think of the work you do in the software like a pencil sketch of an idea
You get everything where it needs to be and laid out,
but then you need to ink the sketch, do coloring and shading. Thats rendering.
If you render a low res work….say a southpark episode. The computer has almost no shading to do, the colors are simple fills, and shadows rarely exist. The rendering speed can approach real time.
If you want to render a photorealistic world, with photorealstic people every object is coated in a high resolution skin, the computer needs to create all the shadows and highlights the sources of light demand…and you want 23fps?..and your rendering times stretch out into YEARS of processing time on your weaksauce laptop.
So you pay to have rendering done at a server farm where hundreds of computers will each chip away at seconds of your footage, returning results….well just about as fast as your wallet allows.
In olden days, animation shops would send their work to cheap foreign sweat shops for dozens of low paid third world artists to “render their ideas a reality in ink and paint” For computer graphics those sweat shops are render farms.
I think they are talking about the act of filling in colour or values. aka you draw a circle and doing all the detail work to turn it into a sphere is rendering. adding colour light and shadow.
In video editing, rendering is creating the finished file (which is then encoded)
You have your source files, and edit them together in the editor, along with all the titles, captions, photos, and filters you want on them. Now it may render a temporary thing to view for playback, but when you go to export the final video file, it’ll render it at the quality you tell it to, creating all the visuals, and then encoding it into one final file.
So, at its simplest, rendering is the computer generating the imagery. and it’s not just a computer term, people have been talking about their renderings for centuries, it just talks about the creation of images.
Rendering is to artists as compiling is to software engineers.
The artist puts any number of polygons (squares/cubs, rectangles/rectangular cuboid, triangles/pyramids, and circles/cylinders for 2d/3d designs) into a 3D computer graphic design software and these polygons make for a very blocky, pointy, and generally framework looking product.
When the artist hits the ‘render’ button the software takes all the corner/point vectors/locations in the polygon design and smooths it out. The more polygons in the render the smoother the end product and the longer it takes. More computer power generally just reduces the time it takes to render.
TL:DR artist 2d/3d rendering is taking the basic framework/skeleton of a computer image and smooth it out to what is seen in the end product.
https://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-basic-rendering/rendering-3d-scene-overview/rendering-3d-scene
Exporting your final work from the software you created it in.
I doubt people who work with paints are using it in that sense. You can ‘render’ a scene as in creating a ‘rendition’ but that’s a different usage to “make computer spit out a file’.
In art, it’s in reference to ‘rendition,’ a word which means a performance or interpretation. An artist’s render is where they take the ideas and inspiration that they’re visualizing and put it to canvas through whatever medium.
In engineering, rendering is the process of displaying an image on a screen through pre-programmed instructions. Same idea as above, but instead of an artists’s imagining of what a finished piece looks like, we’re talking about the ones and zeroes that describe what the finished image is supposed to look like.
Due to their high demands for resolution and graphical fidelity, cg production studios for movies will have ‘render farms,’ similar to a crypto farm, but the computers are being used to render frames of, say, a pixar film. In video games, most modern 3D titles are rendered in real time on your machine, but pre-rendered cg animation is still used for big budget cinematic cutscenes, [Final Fantasy being the most common example.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7EVDWz3tics)
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.
Rendering means: to make something look 3D, or as if it is “real” and has mass. The artist is translating what they see (in front of them or our in their mind’s eye) into an arrangement of forms in the art. In painting, objects are rendered using lines and shapes of color and value (dark and light). In sculpture, objects are rendered with 3D materials, shaped into a form such as clay.
To render is to “give.” The artist is taking a blank canvas and “giving” something which was not there before. So if the artist simply paints the canvas one color with a roller like it’s a wall, that may be “art” but it’s not “rendering.” It’s the act of creating what looks like a “thing” and also of sharing the thing.
1. Hand made art: Rendering would be taking a simplified sketch and adding detail, color. Shading…etc this is the same thing for still 8magery that is painted digitally in photoshop or whatever
2. Digital art: Rendering in digital art refers more to 3D art or animation. The artists and animators will set up the scene in a low resolution way, that doesn’t account for complex light and shadow..etc. That stuff takes a lot of computer processing power. So once they are ready, they let the computer render, which is essentially the computer doing a bunch of math for the light to bounce around, and physics to work properly, to make small particles etc…
Check out this small bit of this clip for a CG example of how they work, then rendered versions
https://youtu.be/XzLp5GQ9AnE/?t=3m51s
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