Rendering a 3D environment

While creating my environment I took renders as I went along to make sure everything would come out alright during the final render. This allowed me to indentify any problems as I went along such as a texture that was inside down or in the wrong place. It also allowed me to see how effective my lighting was with and without shadows as well as its near/far attenuation settings. I also took test renders in 640x480 so I could see close up how the scene would look. This took longer than smaller resolutions but I found it a better alternative since allowed me to see in a better detail. However I found that smaller renders were good to see if the lighting was working for example a blank render would mean the settings are too low and if its too bright then it tells me the settings are too high. This was very useful when testing out the different lights that were available to me.

Simple renders with materials and no lights took seconds to render, however once I added lights it took far longer, and after adding shadows and light tracer the time increased to around four minutes for a single frame. I chose not to spend time on decreasing the render time since I was happy with the final quality of the render each time. Also when rendering I had to decide if I wanted my renders to be a single frame or multiple frames, the default settings helped me find what I wanted, for example when I wanted to check if an animation was actually working I would choose frames 15-25 to make sure whatever animation was working instead of rendering the entire scene at once. All my renders use the default Scalene renderer instead of the more advanced ones, this is because many of the other renderers did not seem to work as well or as fast when used with ray tracing and were better suited for other lights.

The file sizes for singe frame renders vary from 18kb at the lowest to 78kb at the highest. The highest file sizes included the environment map somewhere in the background while the lower renders were still using the environment lighting system and not the ray trace.