Renderingsteknikker

Renderingsteknikker, or rendering techniques, are methods used in computer graphics to generate 2D images from 3D scenes. They cover approaches for computing color, lighting, shadows, textures, and materials. Broadly, techniques are categorized by whether they target real-time interactivity or offline production quality. Real-time rendering favors speed and often relies on rasterization, where vertices are transformed into fragments and colored by shaders. Common elements include texture mapping, shading models such as physically-based rendering (PBR) with BRDFs, and anti-aliasing. Modern real-time pipelines may use deferred shading, which separates geometry from lighting to handle many light sources efficiently, as well as post-processing effects like tone mapping, ambient occlusion, and motion blur. Hardware acceleration and techniques such as level of detail, instancing, and occlusion culling are important for performance. In addition, some real-time engines integrate ray tracing for reflections and global illumination, forming hybrid pipelines.

Offline rendering focuses on image fidelity and realistic lighting without strict time constraints. The core methods include ray tracing, path tracing, and related global illumination techniques such as bidirectional path tracing and photon mapping. These simulate light transport more physically, at higher computational cost. Noise reduction and denoising, importance sampling, and multiple-importance sampling are used to improve convergence. Physically-based rendering emphasizes energy conservation and accurate material models, especially BRDFs like Cook–Torrance, and material parameters such as metallic/roughness in PBR workflows.

Advanced rendering also relies on texture mapping, environment mapping, and HDR color spaces, with tone mapping to display devices. Rendering techniques continue to evolve as hardware capabilities expand, enabling increasingly realistic and interactive imagery.