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.
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This depends on the sort of content you’re viewing. In the case of 3D VFX usually artists will be working from a low resolution model with fewer vertices while animating. They’re usually also not working with final textures or lighting. Then whenever they hit render the low res versions of textures and models get switched out with a high res version. Then of course there’s lighting—usually if you want photoreal lighting you’ll use a process called raytracing. As the name implies, this means when you hit render that the computer “traces” the rays of light and calculates the way light would bounce off of the objects in the scene. This is very processor intensive as one can imagine because light bounces a LOT. Then of course there are things like ambient occlusion, depth of field, and subsurface scattering that have to be calculated.
Oftentimes to save time a studio will split these different calculations into passes which then get rendered out separately or evenly distributed across a render farm. Then it will be brought back together in the composition phase.
In the case of video without VFX, usually editors will be working off of low resolution proxy files that have to be swapped out for the higher resolution ones that contain more data (usually in the color space). Color grading and color correction is then applied to the full resolution file and exported.
Note that the time it takes for the computer to do these calculations will balloon the higher resolution you want the final product to be.
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