Rendering has always been a very discussed issue in animation, according to Scott Metzger, CG Supervisor, rendering can be compared with a religion as the excitement and number of options for the industry of CG and VFX is growing exponentially . One of the issues pointed out as vital for considering carefully the renderer in a production is the cost, due to rendering takes part of the largest part of computational budget(Seymour, 2012). Seymour argues that the main decision to choose one renderer from another in a production could be taken from different perspectives including:
- Reflection and shading models: Realistic renders can only be achieved through a good lights reflection between the surface and the camera; in the other side, shading is how the material properties behaves in all the superface.
- BRDF: The bidirectional reflectance distribution function controles the object's absorption, reflection and scattering between two direction lights.
- Shading: This function is related to how the different scattering applies in a surface, a sinple example is texture mapping.
- Global illumination: According to Jeremy Birn, GI can be defined as: "any rendering algorithm that simulates the inter-flection of light between two surfaces", one of th emain benefits of usign GI is that there is no need of adding bounce lights to recreate indirect lighting.
However many concepts apply in the choosing of a renderer, in my own personal experience using Arnold Renderer in master exercises are its rendering speed, it has fast production saving time and cost, the shading provide smooth distribution in the surfaces and very realistic renders, despite Illumination is a hard process the results are high quality applying simple tools result of excellent GI background. Some of the results are shown bellow:
Seymour (2012). The Art of Rendering. FxGuide [Online] Available: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-art-of-rendering/ [Accessed 17 April 2015]
