Rendering

You may have noticed that when an animated film is being announced, it usually takes quiet a while to finally be released. What you may be surprised to know however, is that the actual animating isn't what takes up most of the time. Instead, the main timesink is a process called "rendering". Basically, when working on an animation, you have your assets and your scene. In most programs you can see how an animation will more or less look by moving a time slider to see how the scene plays out. However, in the program, the fancy textures, lighting, and so on, are not included. Those are all added through the rendering process. An animation itself is nothing but a series of renders put together, much like hand drawn animation.

This slideshow provides an example of what renders may look like. The renders themselves are from a project I did while attending Full Sail University in Florida. The project was a group assignment wherein members were tasked with creating a character, animating them, and putting them into a scene to be rendered. The animation itself was only six seconds long, but the rendering process actually took a few hours. While that may seem a bit ridiculous, if the same animation was rendered with color and texture, the time it would have taken for the rendering to finish would probably have been upwards of a day.

I hope this article and the slideshow have shed a little more light on a vital process in animation!