What is a Rendering Engine?

In recent years, Disney has been keen to remake classic animations and has released live-action versions of Maleficent, Beauty and the Beast. They have achieved amazing consistency between the 3D picture and the original animated picture. It can be said that the 2D animation lens is perfectly restored.Reference picture from Beauty and the Beast There is only one magic weapon to do this - Special Effects!In a VFX movie, these gorgeous effects are 24 pictures per second, even a short 10-second special effect. For the artist who produces the special effect, that is 240 pictures, and sometimes for production needs, And divides a screen into multiple layers. To meet the needs of rendering, most VFX studios choose to rent a commercial render farm for rendering. Of course, there are also a few companies that build their own render farm.But now the CG industry has appeared a technology called cloud rendering, also known as rendering in the cloud.Cloud rendering is to upload materials to the cloud, and remotely use the hardware of those companies that have cloud computing systems to render.This means that no matter where the artist is, he can use cloud rendering to complete the work quickly and easily. It's easy to use, the price is reasonable, and you can perform rendering operations no matter what time and place, without spending time to maintain.RegistrationTo use a cloud rendering service, you need to register with the platform first. Like Fox Renderfarm, there is $25 free credits for every new registration.Project UploadLog in and upload your project with the platform.RenderingThe system will automatically analyze and render your project.Project DownloadDownload the rendered frames with a few simple clicks.And, according to the urgency, you can arrange the order of rendering and monitor the progress of rendering anytime, anywhere. In addition, cloud rendering computing technology can also divide one or more rendering tasks into several parts, which are simultaneously rendered by each node in the cluster, thereby reducing the overall rendering time and shortening the movie production process.For example, if A wants to render a 60-second special effect, 24 pictures in 1 second, the cloud rendering can automatically distribute these 1,440 pictures to 24 machines, and each machine renders 60 pictures. In this way, the rendering time becomes 1/24, and the producer no longer has to worry about rendering issues!The pricing method of cloud rendering is likened to a "home electric meter", and only charges when it is usedThe development of cloud rendering is the general trend.Due to the special nature of film production, special effects studios do not always have something to do, but as soon as they receive production needs, they need to focus and render a large number of materials. If you build your own render farm, you also have to bear the burden of intermittent idle hardware, and cloud rendering is the best solution.Mr. Hublot won the 86th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film with rendering support by Foxrenderfarm in 2014Another advantage of cloud rendering is that it lowers the threshold for special effects production. It allows small studios to also afford high-quality material rendering, which undoubtedly brings new changes to the CG industry. For example, Mr. Hublot, which won the 86th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2014, was produced by an animation team using Foxrenderfarm's cloud rendering technology. This allows many teams to see more hope and the opportunity to bring more high-quality work.Three Robots of Love, Death, and Robots，which also rendered by Fox RenderfarmFox Renderfarm is a leading cloud render farm service in the industry. Since the foundation in 2009, Fox Renderfarm has earned a good reputation for its quality performance, great customer service and flexible pricing scheme.

With the rapid development of 3D movies in recent years, VFX movies have also received more and more attention. From the point of view of the box office of European movies, the top 5 movies Avengers: Endgame, Avatar, Titanic, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Avengers: Infinity War. They are almost inseparable from VFX production. And Disney relied on the 3D animated film Frozen series, sweeping $ 2.574 billion in the world, creating a new record for the global animated film box office.image via internetWhy do you need to use a render farm? Rendering is indispensable behind these movies, and rendering is almost done by various render farms of all sizes.Rendering is the later part of 3D animation production, and rendering is a very time-consuming step in the later stage. An 80-minute animated movie can often be rendered in thousands to tens of thousands of hours.In the animated film COCO, 29,000 lights were used in the scene of the train station; 18,000 lights were in the cemetery; 2000 RenderMan practical lights were used in the Undead World. The production team used the RenderMan API to create 700 special point cloud lights, which expanded to 8.2 million lights. These massive lights are a nightmare for the rendering artist. For the production requirements, the test can not complete such a huge rendering. They once tested rendering and found that these light-filled shots actually took 1,000 hours per frame! They continued their research and shortened it to 125 hours and 75 hours. The rendering time of one frame at the time of final production was 50 hours and one frame. The movie is 24 frames per second, 1440 frames per minute, if a movie is calculated as 90 minutes. That 1440 frames * 90 minutes = 129600 frames, 129600 * 50 = 6480000 hours. Converted into adulthood is 740 years?image via internet"To render Avatar, Weta Digital used a 10,000-square-foot server farm. There are 4,000 servers with a total of 35,000 processor cores. The average time to render a single frame is 2 hours, 160 minutes of video. The overall rendering time takes 2880000 hours, which is equivalent to 328 years of work for one server! "image via internetIf the rendering work is only on a general computer, this is almost impossible. So the production team created its own render farm, powerful machine performance and huge number to complete such a huge amount of work.For small teams, studio, freelancer, and individual producers, rendering take the same time. If they want to spend a lot of time using the computer for rendering work, this is undoubtedly a time-consuming thing, and they are unacceptable. These various reasons, coupled with uncontrollable factors such as computer crashes, special effects artists often cannot complete the work within the time specified by the producer due to rendering problems. Moreover, the labor, material, and electricity required to maintain computer rendering. The cost is also a big fee for the production company!So it is very necessary to work with some render farms. Not only can it save the time of the production staff, but also can use a large number of machines in a limited time to complete the work in a short time.The emergence of cloud rendering technology makes the render farm more mature. Cloud rendering is to upload materials to the cloud and use this cloud computing system of the rendering company to render remotely.Another advantage of cloud rendering is that small studios can also be responsible for rendering high-quality materials. In the film industry, this technological change is no less than the change that cloud computing itself brings to the IT industry.Taking Fox Renderfarm as an example, no matter where the special effects technician is, they can use cloud rendering services to complete the "trilogy": 1. Upload your project; 2. Wait for the rendering to complete; 3. Download to the local machine. In addition, they can call more machines according to their urgency, and they can arrange the order of rendering and monitor the progress of rendering at any time. At the same time, the price is relatively low, which is accepted by many film and television special effects companies, rendering studios, and individual designers. So, why not have a free trial on Fox Renderfarm now? to experience the amazing cloud rendering services to speed up your rendering.

As the leading cloud render farm in the CG industry, Fox Renderfarm knows that in the creation of excellent works, if you do not follow some basic principles, even the best technology in the world can not help the works achieve real effects. Although 3D software has made great progress in the realism field, it can only let you finish 80% at most, and the remaining 20% is that the effect is between 'it looks real' and 'real'.If you are a creator of 3D technology, you need to know the needs of a scene that combines many aspects to create a true photo-realistic image. If not, you feel that a work does not achieve the goal you want, and you can't find the problem. This is very frustrating and time consuming. Here are 5 tips to make rendering more relistic, hope this can help you.Sharp edgeThe computer is perfect, and the real world is not perfect.This is especially true for the edges of objects. Making a cube in any 3D software, its edges are perfect, but the perfect angular edges are usually unreal, they don't exist in the real world.The two surfaces of real-world objects cannot intersect at perfect right angles while remaining completely sharp. If you look at any intersecting planes, they will have rounded corners, broken and uneven areas where they meet.&x3C;p class='img-source'>Rounded corners look more realisticObserve the surrounding objects and see how they differ in their edgesThis natural fillet is very important for creating visual accuracy, they produce highlights, define planes, divide surfaces, and increase volume.Even the sharpest edges must be chamfered. A better practice is to add some subtle scratches to the edges. Popular render engines such as Arnold and Vray have their own technology to achieve this.Pay attention to the shadowShadows are easily ignored by 3D artists, and it's easy to be too bright or too dark to notice the parts of the lights and shadows. And a common feature of CG light sources is that the edges are too sharp, and another disadvantage is that the shadows have no gradients or changes in hue.The shadows in real life are generally softer, and the farther the shadow edge is from the shadow projecting object, the softer it becomes. It is illuminated by the light portion of the surrounding environment, which affects its color and intensity. In general, the shadow intensity (shading) decreases with distance from the shadow projection object.You should avoid using the two light sources below, or use them very carefully.Point Lights /Omni Lights - emits light from all non-physical points in space in all directions. Not only do they produce fake lighting effects, they also produce sharp shadows.Ambient Lights – This light source has the effect of boosting the dark and midtones of the image, allowing more light to bounce off the scene, but it results in a desaturated, faded effect. The best thing is to increase the amount of global lighting bounce or add more lights to the scene.Area Lights Area Lights – This is a glowing surface. Like windows or photographic soft lights, area lights create natural shadows with soft edges and true attenuation, and they also provide the benefits of being visible on reflective surfaces, helping to add realism.Dome Lights /Skylights – Simulating large light sources, such as the sky, introduces a global light source that is useful for establishing realistic lighting conditions.Remember a simple rule that large light sources, such as area lights and dome lights, produce soft shadows, and smaller light sources, such as spotlights, produce sharper shadows.Add imperfectionsFor some even planar models, you need to add some imperfections to its surface. Like walls, those surfaces that look relatively clean and unweathered can still be diverse. Such as light, dust, wear, scratches and unevenness to highlights and shadows.Add noiseQuick and easy to break the perfect, noise can easily do this.A variety of rendering engines provide a wide variety of noise, try to add noise to your diffuse color or texture, adjust the scaling, so that the effect is not particularly obvious, and can subtly break the balance of the surface.&x3C;p class='img-source'>Perfect wall&x3C;p class='img-source'>Add small bump details&x3C;p class='img-source'>Mix a large bump to further break up the highlightsVery simple, right?Be careful not to overuse when adding noise patterns. You can reduce the effect by 20% when the effect is obvious, which will have a very large impact on the authenticity of your image, especially in large-scale indoor scenes.Focal lengthWhat is the default focal length of the camera in your 3D software?If you don't understand the effect of focus on the image, then it's a big obstacle to rendering realistic images.When the photographer composes the picture, he will pay great attention to choosing the appropriate focal length and framing frame. This is a side that 3D artists often overlook. It's too easy to start framing with the default camera. Many people don't even think about the focal length used.It is very important to have a basic understanding of the principles of composition and focal length.A common mistake is that the ultra-wide lens has no distortion, and the wide-angle lens has no depth of field. Distortion and depth of field are turned off by default in 3D software.It's best to come up with a real camera (preferably an SLR camera), experience the workings of the physical lens, study the results, and understand the choice of the lens, which will make your work better.Add realismHighlight highlights and bloom.The highlight in the scene will be the visible light source and its reflection. The camera and lens will handle these bright areas as much as possible. In this case, using "copy" is correct, because when dealing with these bright areas, the lens will produce some illusions. The side effects of these strong spots are usually high light and glow. These imperfections have become part of our vision, so they can add a lot of realism to the image.It is recommended to add these effects to post-production.The image above is the original rendering. The picture below adds glow and glare.Add graininessThe film used in traditional cameras will cause the image to produce an image of particles, while the 3D image of the camera can not produce graininess, and we will break the perfection of 3D images by adding some imperfect particles.In post-production, two main grainy sensations can be added to the image. It can be programmed in a program like Photoshop or Nuke. The advantage is flexibility and height adjustment, which can be fine-tuned according to the RGB channel of the image.It is also possible to use a material containing particles for superposition, although the degree of adjustment is not high, but it is fast and effective.Increase in graininessAll these tips have a common feature that breaks perfection in order to be more realistic.The best results can be achieved by observing the real world and discovering the nuances you see, making up for the gap between the 3D world and reality.Fox Renderfarm hopes it will be of some help to you. As you know, Fox Renderfarm is an excellent cloud rendering farm in the CG world, so if you need to find a render farm, why not try Fox Renderfarm, which is offering a free $25 trial for new users? Thanks for reading!