Hi there

i have a big question, maybe i don’t get the rendering process that much, but anyway:

considering the great visuals we have on today’s games, why do we still wait so much for a render instead of rendering it realtime?

i’m out looking for the answer, but i’m not finding much material. is it too difficult? do i HAVE to use realtime shaders such as openGl instead of an usual Phong? couldn’t it simply run beautifully as an game at my viewport and then be captured into a movie file?

i actually don’t know how clever or dumb these questions might be.

thx anyway if anybody have a clue and could point directions =)

Not an expert at this, but realtime rendering and “slow-render” has some differences.

I believe a majority of games use baked textures, meaning that the textures they use on walls and characters have often been pre-rendered.  Simply because doing this in-game would be too time-consuming. However as realtime effects and engines improve, so they have taken on effects like reflecting and dynamically moving water etc. But we are then also talking reflection used together with reflection maps - since actually raytracing the environment would be much too cpu- and time-consuming.

If I were you I would perhaps try something like Hypershot ( http://www.bunkspeed.com/hypershot/ ) and then compare this to “slow” XSI/Mental Ray rendering to gain some understanding of the differences.

Actually, there are a few things that people don’t realize about games.

We go through what is called a build process for every time we compile data for games.  The data needs to be compressed and optimized in order for it to be used in a real-time environment.  Most of the rendering elements such as GI, Ambient Occlusion, post effects, etc… are done in a live space without any prebaked textures.  But they all have to be precomputed in the CPU before the data can be outputted for a GPU environment.

I’ve been arguing the fact that we can make fairly good looking movies using GPU rendering but most people in post production refuse to believe that there can be anything a game engine offer that can be of use to them.  Then I show them the Cry-Engine demo from a few years back and watch their jaws drop.  LOL

- Nghia