Software rendering: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:38, 25 November 2021

Revision as of 17:11, 11 December 2021

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Contrary to real-time rendering, performance is only of second priority with pre-rendering. It is used mainly in the film industry to create high-quality renderings of lifelike scenes. Many [[special effects]] in today's movies are entirely or partially created by computer graphics. For example, the character of [[Gollum]] in the [[Peter Jackson]] ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' films is completely [[computer-generated imagery]] (CGI). Also for [[animation]] movies, CGI is gaining popularity. Most notably [[Pixar]] has produced a series of movies such as ''[[Toy Story]]'' and ''[[Finding Nemo]]'', and the [[Blender Foundation]] the world's first [[Blender (software)#Open projects|open movie]] ''[[Elephants Dream]]''.

Because of the need for very high-quality and diversity of effects, offline rendering requires a lot of flexibility. Even though commercial real-time graphics hardware is gettingbecoming higher in quality and more programmable by the day, most [[photorealistic rendering|photorealistic]] CGI still requires software rendering. Pixar's [[RenderMan (software)|RenderMan]], for example, allows shaders of unlimited length and complexity, demanding a general-purpose processor. Techniques for high realism like [[Ray tracing (graphics)|raytracing]] and [[global illumination]] are also inherently unsuited for hardware implementation and in most cases are realized purely in software.

==See also==