Render Engine
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A render engine is a piece of software that, among other things, creates the final image for a given scene with lighting and materials simulated.
Types
Most render engines fall into 2 camps:
- Ray traced
- Rasterized
Each method calculates lighting and materials differently. Some engines may also implement a combination of both.
Ray Tracing
Ray tracing is a method by which an engine simulates light by creating rays and simulating their bounces in the scene. Ray tracing engines include Cycles.
Ray tracing has advantage of being close to the real world, at the cost of performance. In addition, many ray tracing engines use Monte Carlo Integration, which creates noise, and often are either ran for long periods of time, or paired with a Denoiser.
Rasterization
Rasterization is a method of simulating light without ray tracing. This is usually done by taking multiple renders of the scene, and either adding or subtracting light based on what is visible. Rasterized engines include EEVEE.
While rasterization is fast and doesn't create much noise, it typically won't create accurate wikipedia:Global_illumination