Rendering is the term referred to in many creative industries as creating a “preview” (often in the form of a still image) of a piece of geometry with certain materials and visual effects present. In short, creating a picture of what a piece of geometry (product, building etc) without having to physically make one. Traditionally this has always been done by hand with coloured markers and pastels, but in recent years the industry is continually moving over to digital media as technology is quickly offering incredible results, faster than ever before.
There are basically three different ‘types’ of rendering that are typically used in the design industry:
Hand rendering is by far the quickest type of rendering used to gain decent results. The process involves sketching the geometry and then using markers, guage, pastells and other materials to show shading, highlights and textures over the sketch. Generally these renders are used in the conceptual stage of the design process and are predominantly used to quickly communicate a concepts aesthetic to a client or stakeholder.
Whilst in the past, these were still used for final presentations, most of the design industry only uses them for churning out a lot of concepts in a short amount of time. This form of rendering requires a lot of skill not only in sketching, but also in understanding shading and the way light will hit an object.
Digital Illustration is very similar to hand rendering in the theory, but instead of using markers, guage, pastells etc. complex digital graphics applications are used. Whilst this method can use sketches as a starting point for the rendering, often Digital Illustration is used to render orthographic views without the need of a 3D file. This can give a crisp presentation quality render before any labour intensive 3D modelling takes place developing the concept. Digital Illustration is sometimes the preferred medium to communicate designs throughout the conceptual, development and sometimes even post production stages of the design.
It should be noted that there are two different file types of digital illustration; Vector based programs (such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw) use mathematical equations to create and store the information. Because these are mathematical equations, these renderings can be blown up to any desired size without losing any quality and without taking up any more hard drive space. The down-side to these renders is that they are limited in what textures can be produced which often need to be imported (restricting the size of the render to the pixel based imported file).
Pixel based programs (such as Adobe Photoshop) use lots of little dots (pixels) to create and store the information. While pixel based renders can achieve virtually any textures and shading, the renders are restricted to the size (number of pixels) they are created with.
It is not uncommon for renders to be a mixture of pixels and vectors. Whilst the sizes are still restricted, the vector-based geometry is often easier to edit making the files more versatile.
3D Digital Rendering is the most powerful type of rendering, it relies on having a 3D model of your product (each renderer will require it’s own specific formats). 3D Digital Rendering can produce a variety of different qualities and styles of renders. As it is directly linked to the 3D file, it can be a very accurate way of obtaining a visual of your product before or after it has gone to production.
Due to its labour intensive nature of working off a 3D model and the set up time, these renders are often used towards the latter stages of the design process. Accurate and photo-realistic renders are often used in important presentations, advertising, product packaging or press releases and are often percieved as real photos of the product.
One of the major advantages of using 3D digital rendering is that the 3D file used to create these renders can also be used to produce a physical prototype using rapid prototyping technologies or if it’s appropriately detailed can be used for full scale production.
There are may industries that use rendering either in the development of their product, or in promoting their product. Some of the more common industries that use computer generated renderings are:
Between the industries, rendering is often used for different purposes and thus place their priorities upon different aspects of the render. As an example, an Architecture firm will place a lot of emphasis on how their building looks as a whole rather than the accuracies of each specific component or material. A mobile phone designer will place a lot of emphasis on the exact look of each material and component as a lot of the beauty is in the details. Finally, a marketing firm may not care about the “accuracy” of the materials, but just want the render to make their product look good and suit their branding.
What ever the industry, computer generated rendering is quickly becoming a standard for presentations and often competing with traditional product photography not only on price, but versatility and quality.
Until recently, product photography has been the only way to obtain a realistic image of a product or building. Technology advancements in the rendering software and computer hardware have now made it possible to match the quality of product photography, without the labour intensive set up and post editing. For this reason, digital rendering is often a quicker (depending on numbers), cheaper and defect-free alternative to product photography.
There are of course instances where photography is still the best option. A photo shoot can produce hundreds of images in a short amount of time, are captured in an extremely high resolution and often involve people or organic forms (that are extremely time consuming to render well) within the shoot.