ABSTRACT
WHAT IS “RENDERING”? You will oen hear the term “rendering” in connection to 3D computer graphics. It is tossed around a lot, oen without any real subjective explanation. Aer a while (say, 10 years), you start to get what rendering is, but you might be embarrassed that you can’t clearly dene it in dictionary-like terms. Rendering is the act of converting any geometry (2D or 3D) into pixels on your screen or saved in an image le. Although this sounds incredibly simple, the calculations needed to perform this operation are incredibly complex, and have been in the process of development for almost 50 years. It takes many calculations just to make a single pixel appear on your screen based on geometry in a 2D or 3D computer graphics package.
