I’ve seen a lot of Youtubers mentioning in their videos that “This took so-so many hours to render” ,and I don’t understand if something is visible as it is before render why is it so much time-consuming to extract it in that form itself without rendering. I know I might be sounding so dumb but I really need to know how things get rendered be it a video or VFX shots.
Thanks.
In: 2
Image quality is the problem. Ever played a 3d video game and thought “wow, those shadows on the moving players/characters/monsters look like crap!”
Well, good quality rendering will actually fire rays of light from the light sources to the objects and trace their exact shadows. And it is mindful of multiple light sources, how they are brighter in some areas and darker in some areas, and produce proper illumination at all locations, shadow or otherwise.
And that’s just the tip of the ice berg. If you’re in a room with 2 walls painted different colours… let’s say one is white but the other is a blue colour… the white on the edge of the blue wall looks slightly blue because light is reflecting off the blue wall and that reflection is blue light. A “good render” will do exactly that. Similarly, if the light coming into the room is a shade of red, the wall will tend to look darker because a blue wall doesn’t reflect red light very much.
In short, light bounces around a lot, and realistic lighting must take that into account. And it’s a LOT of work.
These are just some of the subtleties of light that your graphics card doesn’t process when you need 60 frames per second or more. In fact it can take hours to produce a single image that properly accounts for all these things.
(And the above list is by no means complete. Materials that are polished act a bit like mirrors for light, dull edges do scatter light a bit, and so on and so forth. Everything reflects light at least a little bit, or else it would look black)
Latest Answers