Trick of the Light: The Evolution of Rendering

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/f0WeT9kc0iI?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

Whether you’re playing a round on Novibet slots, exploring in a giant sandbox such as Minecraft, or shooting at baddies in Call of Duty, you can’t deny that video game graphics have come a long way since the days of 8-bit pixel art. In a few short decades, video games have managed to progress from having characters that vaguely resemble humans and spaceships to having graphics that are good enough and immersive enough to be used in VR technology.

Part of this is a result of computers and consoles evolving to be able to process more data, and therefore interpret and display more detailed images. However, another overlooked improvement to the realism of games is the technology behind rendering these graphics.

What Is Rendering?

Rendering (also known as image synthesis) is the process of digitally generating an image that can be photorealistic or non-photorealistic based on a model. This process is actually relatively useful, since that means that nitty gritty details like how the sunlight filtering into the room from the window may look different if your character moves out into the hallway instead. This is important for games that aim to be immersive or which allow the players to move around freely, since with the current frame rate of video games, it is impossible for any graphics designer (no matter how skilled) to account for every possible angle and every frame.

Rendering technology has of course not just been limited to games. Many of the more recent animated movies from Pixar and Disney that are making use of 3D-esque characters also make use of the same technology in order to create more realistic backgrounds and interactions between the character and the environment. Rendering technology has improved by leaps and bounds since its conception in the 1970s.

Rendering is extremely useful to any graphic designer that may be working with lots of camera movement, since what a model does is essentially just sit there. However, more importantly, it creates a perfect point of reference no matter the angle you’re viewing it from, thus cutting out the possibility of issues such as continuity errors. This type of consistency was key to the development of game graphics, since it meant that the character could move around the 3D object and the object’s dimensions would be consistent and stationary. This allowed for a 3D object to feel more realistic, since objects in real life behave the same way.

How Has Rendering Technology Improved?

When rendering was first developed by Ivan Sutherland (often dubbed the father of Computer Graphics) in the 1970s with the invention of the program Sketchpad, it could really only handle simple shapes such as spheres and cubes. Nonetheless, this was what kickstarted Computer Generated Visualizations that we see today.

Edwin Catmull (Sutherland’s student) made his teacher proud with his experimentations, and it can safely be said that he forever changed the history of Hollywood with one of the first CGI animated films: “A Computer Animated Hand,” which he created in 1972. Although it’s a far cry from the animation standard that we generally expect nowadays, Catmull’s “A Computer Animated Hand” and Newell’s Utah teapot had to walk so that animation juggernauts like Disney and Pixar can now run.

Another notable development was that Jim Blinn (a computer graphist) introduced texture mapping in the mid-1980s. This brought rendering to a whole new level and opened up a lot of doors for artists to play around with, since now they could combine rendering technology and surfaces that weren’t just smooth planes to create more realistic models.

The concept behind rendering has remained largely unchanged. You use a painful amount of mathematical data in order to represent the geometry of the model, and this feeds the computer information on how light would interact with the surface. However, what has changed is the fact that as rendering programs have greatly improved and can now more accurately replicate the way that light would interact with various models. The biggest perhaps is now the fact that much of the rendering process is done automatically by the computer, which means that graphist don’t have to spend as much time on the rendering itself and can instead focus on the quality of the production.

That being said, rendering is still one of the most time consuming processes in the production of games, since it involves lots of calculations and refinements in order to produce photo-realistic graphics that will hold up to the scrutiny of gamers. In fact, most modern games have in-built Real Time Rendering programs coded into them, which allows for the rapid calculations needed to render multiple models at a very fast speed (around 60 times a second).

Rendering technology is now the backbone for industries like virtual and augmented reality, which try to be immersive and realistic. This technology has come a long way since its early days, and it is highly likely that it will continue to develop and surprise us with its capacity and flexibility.