Exploring Render Mode
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
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LESSON OVERVIEW
In this lesson, you’ll explore how to render a 3D scene and learn the following:
The three different places that rendering takes place in Dimension, and how they differ from one another
The limitations of on-canvas rendering
The trade-offs between render speed and quality
How to achieve the highest-quality rendered image
This lesson will take about 45 minutes to complete. Please log in to your account on peachpit.com to download the lesson files for this lesson, or go to the “Getting Started” section at the beginning of this book and follow the instructions under “Accessing the lesson files and Web Edition.” Store the files on your computer in a convenient location.
Your Account page is also where you’ll find any updates to the lesson files. Look on the Lesson & Update Files tab to access the most current content.
What is rendering?
Renderingrefers to the process of producing a realistic-looking 2D scene from a 3D model or models.
Dimension uses a form of rendering called ray tracing. A high-level explanation of ray tracing is that the computer has to calculate a path from each pixel in the scene back to the camera and calculate the color of that pixel based on the environment lighting, the sunlight, the material applied to the surface, and reflections from other objects. This requires a lot of computing horsepower, and is far too complex for today’s computers to accomplish in real time as a scene is edited.
Because of this, Dimension offers three levels of rendering: a rough “on-canvas” rendering that Dimension performs as you edit a 3D scene, a render preview, and Render mode.
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NOTE
Dimension uses a proprietary ray tracing renderer owned by Adobe. Earlier versions of Dimension used a ray tracing renderer developed by Chaos Group. If you wish to use this earlier rendering engine, you can switch the renderer in Dimension’s Preferences (Adobe Dimension CC > Preferences on the Mac, or Edit > Preferences on Windows).
