Render times - versus games

[dan1el]

many games utilizes the graphics cards abilities, much better than 3Dmax or Maya...but one key difference is the game does not render out bitmaps, it's actually more like looking into the viewport in 3D max or Maya, so just imagine you have the game in the viewport, you twist and turn around in it. while 3Dmax/maya have to be more precise and render out things such as alpha channels and raytracing (I don't think there is any games yet that actually raytraces at a really decent quality yet) and those calculations are with the result of a bitmap image for either illustration or animation.

there are plugins to various 3D softwares where you work more with the lights etc. in the viewport (where you get an almost game-like feel of the objects you work with) but even these do not produce the result you want, you still have to render out the viewport.

[Robsk]

Thanks for this, it does explain a few things. I have to say that some of the games these days, as I've not really been in the loop for many years, seem incredibly impressive! Despite these differences - and i had put it primarily down to the difference in accuracy required - it still seems that they do utilise the graphical potential of processors etc very, very well!

[imashination]

The reason why, is because games are horribly horribly, massively restricted compared to the 3d app.

Have you ever zoomed in with the sniper scope and noticed a load of weird jaggy polys in the distance?

Have you ever walked into some geometry and noticed you cant see the surface from the inside?

Have you ever noticed there is a maximum of 4 shadow-casting lights in a scene at any given time?

Theres only 1 reflection
Theres no real refraction, just some swirly effects on water

If you added all these limitations to the render engine, you can make things render much faster.

[vlad]

It's hard to say how far off we are from full blown globally illuminated-soft shadowed-volumetrically lit-depth of fielded-chromatic abberated-physically correct blurry reflected/refracted-(etc) real realtime renders, but hmm, we're not quite there yet... :hmm:

[DanielWray]

Use shadow maps (buffer shadows) instead of ray-traced shadows, use relfection maps instead of ray-traced shadows etc etc. All of these things speed up the rendering process.

To be honest though, the render engine that max has (Vray.. or something) is terribly slow for the most part, it can, in the right hands be quite good/ quick, but i've yet to see it produce a standard sort of render (simple materials, one light with shadow) in less than 5/ 10 minutes.

[ThE_JacO]

Use shadow maps (buffer shadows) instead of ray-traced shadows, use relfection maps instead of ray-traced shadows etc etc. All of these things speed up the rendering process.

To be honest though, the render engine that max has (Vray.. or something) is terribly slow for the most part, it can, in the right hands be quite good/ quick, but i've yet to see it produce a standard sort of render (simple materials, one light with shadow) in less than 5/ 10 minutes.
Max, by default, comes with a scanline rendering engine that is quite long in the tooth but has its moments, and the seemingly inevitable MRay alongside (which is what you also get in maya and xsi).
Defaults aside, if there is ONE app that has plugins to access pretty much every rendering engine under the sun, that's max. So I'm not really sure what you're talking about there :)

As for games vs software rendering engines, the differences in assets contribute at least half the difference in speed before the engine even comes into play.

Start feeding your rendering engine of choice models with severely reduced polycounts, all maps limited to less than 1k square, aligned and polished, and then make sure every single shader in the game has been optimized and lovingly hand-crafted to take as few cycles as possible.
Then limit your shadow maps to 64x64 to 512x512, turn off any raytracing, set the engine to rasterize, turn off any bruteforce supersampling, make sure you bake 80% of the environment illumination back into the textures after the first pass and light those environments again just at vertex level (and not at the fragment), and you'll see whatever rendering engine you use breezing through your scenes ;)

[vlad]

... but i've yet to see it produce a standard sort of render (simple materials, one light with shadow) in less than 5/ 10 minutes.

Well here's one arbitrary statement if I ever read one ;)

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