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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Rendering just means adding more detail to make the piece more realistic (or more accurate to the image in your mind for abstract pieces)
So photorealistic paintings represent the peak of rendering. You cannot render beyond real life.
For classic art (Paint, graphite, sculpture, dance, theater) ‘Rendering’ is simply a synonym for ‘depict’ or ‘copy’.
* You paint a landscape, you are ‘rendering’ a image of a landscape.
* You perform a dance or play, you are ‘rendering’ the artist’s concept in dance or acting
* Even in the military, you salute you are ‘rendering’ a salute. Which means you copy the designated process of saluting.
For computer art, ‘Rendering’ means letting the computer ‘calculate’ the final artwork from the artists’ inputs, which may be vector, photoshop or even code. The industry ‘borrowed’ the term that most closely related to the process.
Rendering is simply producing an image. An artist can render your dog on paper with graphite by hand. You might call it drawing. But a skilled professional is likely to prefer ‘render’ over ‘drawing’.
Another artist might have different skills and tools. With the skills of a sculptor or modeller and an animator a computer or group of computers (render farm) can produce/render an image or video (a series of images).
You could say my kid rendered the death of Caesar in a diorama for school. You would be lying because I don’t have kids but you could say that.
Lots of artists and lots of computers have rendered images and video without realism or 3D looking shadows or shading.
As someone who works in television, here is my answer:
When editing a television show, you often add effects to the original footage. Maybe you have changed the way the picture looks by correcting the colours. You may also add an effect that zooms into the picture as it plays. For good measure lets say you also slow it down.
Each of these effects, and the many others that exist, equals more processing power and the computer starts to struggle eventually. Most often, we experience this as a playback issue – instead of playing smoothly as you would see on your TV, it stutters as the computer struggles to keep up.
So we render it. In this instance, the word render refers to the creation of brand new media, including all the effects you have added, in order that the machine no longer needs to process all the effects – it just reads the newly created media.
Remember when you played sims, and in the loading screen it said “reticulating splines”? It’s like that. That’s the best ELI5 you’ll get 😌
In architecture and related disciplines (I first learned this in theatrical stage scenery design), a rendering is a drawing meant to mimic a photograph of what the project will eventually look like. This is in contrast to a plan, which is a straight-down view, or an elevation, which is a straight from the side view.
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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