What Is Rendering?
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Rendering is the final step in creating 3D animation and involves giving objects attributes such as colors, surface textures, and degrees of transparency. When Extreme 3D renders an image, it uses the geometry of the objects you have created to produce a realistic two-dimensional picture of your three-dimensional scene. It does this by converting the geometry of each object into a number of surface polygons. Depending on the rendering style (or, in other words, how much detail you have told the program to display), these surface polygons can be used to calculate how light reacts with these surfaces, thereby producing a lifelike representation. You can also apply a shading algorithm to provide more uniform transitions between polygons. What is displayed in your workspace while you are modeling is, in fact, a version of rendering called the interactive renderer. There are two types of internal renderer in Extreme 3D: the final renderer and the interactive renderer. The final renderer is the high-quality version; it's the one you will use when you finally decide to commit your image to disk. By that time, you most likely will have already used it while you were creating your scene with the Final Render to Screen command under the Render menu. E3D version 2 also supports the external use of Direct3D (Windows) and QuickDraw 3D (Mac) for interactive rendering, allowing you to incorporate 3D acceleration hardware. In comparison with the final renderer, the interactive renderer is very much a working tool that allows you to get an idea of how your image is progressing while you compose it. It is called interactive because it can be configured to show you purely the amount of detail you need at any one time, meaning that the trade-off between picture quality and rendering time is therefore determined by you. Unless you tell Extreme 3D otherwise, it automatically uses the interactive renderer while you view your scene. Technically speaking, your image is always rendered; even if you are looking at bounding boxes only, this is actually the interactive renderer working at its lowest render style. The aim is to show you how to render your model to a file as a single image using the final renderer to achieve the level of quality you desire. With two-dimensional images destined for the Web, you will usually want to render at the best quality possible in Extreme 3D. This means a longer rendering time, but because your image size will need to be relatively small anyway to be usable on the Web, even high-quality renders should execute pretty quickly. |
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