In this lesson video, we are going to discuss about the rendering engines available in blender, and also about the render the viewport shading mode. First, let's start with the basic terms. So we all have the same starting point. The term rendering in 3d computer graphics is basically a calculation process done by computer to output an image from the working 3d data. If you render multiple images, then these images can be combined into a video. So technically, the process of rendering an animation is the same as rendering a single image.
You just need to do multiple image rendering to render an animation. The rendering process of a single image can take hours or even days depending on the complexity of the 3d data, but it can also happen in just a split of a second. This is where the term real time rendering comes into play. Basically, real time rendering is the rendering process that can happen so fast multiple times in one second. This kind of rendering speed is needed for interactive applications, such as video games, or VR, etc. The next term is the rendering engine.
Essentially, rendering engine is a piece of program responsible for performing the rendering task. By default Blender comes with three native rendering engines. To access them, we can go to the properties editor, and then open the render Properties panel, which is this tab that has a camera like I can. If you click here, you can see the three rendering engines available in render, Eevee, workbench and cycles. If you installed a third party rendering engine, you will see more options here. A quick explanation about each of these rendering engines.
First is the workbench these rendering engine is actually what we have seen so far when we are in wireframe view mode and in the solid view mode. workbench is a real time rendering engine that mainly focuses on providing users to work effectively in 3d viewport. So it is not designed to produce pretty pictures, it is more geared towards speed. Next is cycles rendering engine. In contrast to the workbench rendering engine cycles is built for outputting high quality photo realistic results. It is a rendering engine comparable to any modern renderers such as V Ray, Corona, octane, Arnold, etc.
Cycles can do all of these things because it simulates how light behaves in the real world. But it does so with the cost of the rendering time cycles is the slowest rendering engine compared to Eevee or workbench. Finally, Eevee already Engine Eevee is the new kid on the block. Since Blender version 2.8 released Eevee is standing in the middle between the workbench and the cycles rendering engines. I mean in terms of picture quality Evie is way better than workbench, but it is still below cycles. And in terms of rendering speed Eevee is actually designed as a real time rendering engine, so it is way faster than cycles, but it is still slower than the workbench engine.
Eevee uses a lot of modern graphics technologies to cut corners comparable to those that you can find in popular game engines such as unity or unreal game engines, etc. in blender, there are two types of rendering process final rendering and preview rendering. Now these are just my own terms for differentiating the two what I mean about preview rendering is basically seeing your rendering result directly in the viewport. You can do this by activating the rendered viewport shading mode, which is this button up here. In this mode, you can get instant visual feedback and still be able to rotate the viewport freely, and also able to select and manipulate objects in the scene. But in this mode, you cannot say if the rendering resolves to an image.
The other type of rendering is the final rendering. This rendering type is not performed in a 3d viewport, so you cannot interact with the objects in the scene directly. But you can save the final result to an image so that later you can use that image in other graphics software. The last difference between the two is camera. In preview rendering mode, you don't really need any camera object. But in the final rendering mode, having a camera object is a must.
You cannot perform any final rendering. We don't enjoy Camera object. We will discuss more about the final rendering process in a later lesson. For now, let's focus on the preview rendering. Just to recap what we have learned so far about viewport shedding modes, this is the wireframe mode. And this is the solid view mode.
These two modes actually use the workbench engine, regardless of what rendering engine you use in the Properties editor. Okay, next is the look dev mode or the material preview mode. This mode actually uses the Eevee rendering engine. So again, regardless of what rendering engine you choose in the Properties editor, the loop death mode always uses Eevee rendering engine. Okay, the last one is the render the viewport shedding mode. This is the mode where we do preview rendering.
It is the only mode where the rendering engine option in the Properties editor really matters. So you If you have this render shedding mode active, changing the rendering engine from Eevee to cycles, for example, or to workbench, for example, really makes a big difference in what you see in the viewport. And these differences also show in the sharing option, if we have the workbench active for example, when you open the shading option panel, you will not see any settings that you can tweak in here. But if we change this to cycles, we get a pause button in here and several settings in the shading option panel. We are not going to discuss about cycles now because later we will have a dedicated section about it and show law. For now let's change the rendering engine back to Eevee.
In Eevee, the render shedding option will display the same settings we have seen in the loop Deaf mode, so I'm pretty sure you already familiar with these settings.