Production Rendering

Where the math meets reality:

Real-time (60+ FPS):

• Rasterization (GPU pipelines).
• OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX 12, Metal, WebGPU.
• Game engines: Unity, Unreal, Godot, Bevy.
• Hybrid: rasterize geometry, ray-trace reflections (RTX).

Offline (minutes-hours per frame):

• Production path tracers.
• Pixar RenderMan, Autodesk Arnold, Blender Cycles.
• Physically-correct materials (PBR).
• Films, animation, archviz.

Materials:

• PBR: BaseColor + Roughness + Metallic + Normal map.
• Disney Principled BSDF: industry standard.
• Subsurface scattering for skin.
• Anisotropic for brushed metal.
• Translucent (glass, water).

Texturing:

• 2D images mapped to 3D surfaces via UV coords.
• Diffuse maps, normal maps, roughness maps, metallic maps.
• Mipmaps: pre-computed lower-res for distant surfaces.
• Anisotropic filtering for grazing angles.

Global illumination:

• Light bounces off surfaces, illuminates others.
• Path tracing: thousands of samples per pixel.
• Photon mapping: pre-pass photons.
• Radiosity: light energy diffusion.

Real-time GI:

• Lightmaps: pre-computed bakes.
• Probe-based: irradiance probes scattered in scene.
• Voxel cone tracing.
• DDGI (Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination, NVIDIA).

Modern AAA hybrid:

• Geometry: rasterized with deferred shading.
• Reflections: hardware ray tracing.
• Ambient occlusion: screen-space (SSAO).
• Shadows: cascaded shadow maps + ray-traced soft shadows.
• Post-processing: tone mapping, bloom, film grain, color grading.

Denoising:

• Path tracing is noisy at low samples.
• Apply learned denoiser (NVIDIA OptiX denoiser, Intel Open Image Denoise).
• 1-4 samples per pixel + denoise → high quality.
• Enables real-time path tracing on RTX cards.

Anti-aliasing:

• MSAA (multisample): per-pixel multiple depth samples.
• TAA (temporal): blend across frames.
• DLSS / FSR: AI upscaling from lower resolution.

Mesh data:

• Vertex buffers, index buffers.
• Indexed triangles save memory + cache.
• Vertex attributes: position, normal, UV, color, tangent.

Render scale:

• AAA games: 100M+ triangles per frame.
• Films: billions of triangles, hundreds of lights.
• Volumetrics, hair, clouds, water, fire — special techniques each.

Don't roll your own for production. Use Unity/Unreal/Godot for games. Blender Cycles for offline.

Build a tinyrenderer (Dmitry Sokolov's series) to learn. Or build a path tracer following PBRT. Then use real engines.