Chapter 12

Rendering: Faster, Processor!

Rendering Basics

The eternal conflict in rendering is between time and quality. Generally, enabling rendering options that can lead to greater believability costs you time. We’ve already seen this, particularly in Chapter 7 on surfacing and Chapter 5 on lighting. Recall how certain material options like ray-traced transparency with index of refraction, blurry reflections, and subsurface scattering, or lighting techniques like ambient occlusion can drastically increase rendering times.

For a final render of a still image, render times aren’t really a factor. Who cares if your image takes two hours to render? The problem though, is when you get into animation. A mere 30 seconds of animation requires 900 ...

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