Chapter 5. Rendering
When we work with a 3D program, any 3D program, we can see and manipulate the geometry in real time. In other words, we can move, rotate, scale and do a lot of other operations on the geometric objects right on the screen, and the software responds to our actions immediately. What we see on the screen though is an approximation of the final image. This is because it would take too long to draw all the objects in the scenes and to calculate the effects of lights and materials. In fact, creating a faithful representation of the final image can take several minutes or even a few hours, depending on the complexity of the scene and the hardware available.
The creation of an accurate image that takes into account all the geometric transformations, all the lights, and all the materials is called rendering the scene.
In this chapter you will learn the following topics:
- Rendering an image to a file on disk
- Selecting a graphic format for your image
- Adjusting the rendering...