In Computer Animation, What is Rendering?

Rendering refers to the process of building output files from computer animations. When an animation renders, the animation program takes the various components, variables, and actions in an animated scene and builds the final viewable result. A render can be an individual image or a series of images (frames) saved individually or sequenced into video format.

Renders can often drastically differ from the animation environment, especially in 3D animation.

Many things such as textures or particle effects are displayed only in basic form in the animation environment, but rendering details the full graphical effect.

In highly complex animations, rendering can take a great deal of time as the program processes each pixel in each frame. Some programs also have low-quality render settings that allow fast test renders to be sure that the animation, models, or effects are behaving according to expectations.

Rendering is basically taking whatever you've made in whatever computer program you've used and changing it so that someone without that program can view it. Whether that be as individual images like rendering out an image sequence, or a full video that you plan to upload to YouTube or Vimeo.

Rendering can take forever, but it's a necessary step if you want to share your work with anyone besides yourself. If you want your renders to go faster, most render engines run off of RAM so the more RAM you have the faster your renders will be.

In the mean time it's a great break to play on your phone and have a perfect excuse to why you're not working.