Choose the right rendering option for your project goals.
BRIO has two rendering engines to choose from when creating your 3D scene.
- The BRIO Real-Time Engine will allow you to create fast, interactive 3D/AR/VR experiences for your audience that can be viewed on any device.
- Ultra Render produces high quality, photorealistic renders that will help you accurately represent your product to customers or design stakeholders.
Light baking is a technique that enhances the look of Real-Time scenes by mimicking the realistic lighting effects generated by Ultra Render.
The right rendering option for you will depend on how you intend to share your scene, as well as the graphics capabilities of your computer.
Real Time Rendering
RT is the default render engine. As the name implies, this engine renders graphics quickly, allowing for animations to be viewed in real time, and letting you see changes almost immediately as you work.
Choose Real-Time rendering if:
- You want to present a real-time, interactive, 360 view of your product
- Your scene needs to perform on mobile devices, or you plan to share it widely online.
- You are embedding the scene to your website or e-commerce store.
- Your scene includes animations, behaviours, or product configurators.
Ultra Render
How it works:
Put simply, the ultra render engine traces light along a path from the camera lens to where it hits a surface. It then calculates all direct and indirect light contained in that path the same way it would be processed by the human eye. This technique produces extremely realistic light, shadows, and reflections. It is also more effective at rendering translucent materials.
However path tracing takes longer than real-time rendering and requires much more computational power. Plus (since the engine traces paths from the camera lens to a surface to create the render), the engine will need to re-render the scene in the viewer every time the camera is moved or the scene is modified. For this reason, Ultra Render is best for rendering high quality still images rather than interactive scenes.
When to use Ultra Render
- You want to present an accurate representation of your product to customers or stakeholders
- You want to produce photorealistic renders without the use of expensive software
- Your computer has a workstation class graphics card (GPU) suitable for 3d Gaming or high-end graphics work
Note: When exporting your render you can choose to download the images, or share the link to the live BRIO scene. If you are sharing via link, your audience will also require a suitable computer graphics card for rendering.
Ultra Render Workflow
Light Baking
Light baking is a technique that will allow you to achieve the realistic look produced by path tracing in a way that can be viewed in the real time render engine. This means your scene will have nearly the same photorealistic quality, but will be viewable on a wider range of devices, allow for interactivity, and perform much faster.
How it works
Without light baking, lighting is rendered by calculating the effects of a light source on its surroundings it in real time. This is an expensive process for your computer, especially in scenes with multiple lights.
Light baking calculates the effect of lights on the textures in your scene, then creates new textures with those lighting effects mapped on - ie. added shadows, changes in colour, etc. It then replaces the textures in your scene with these new textures, or “lightmaps”. Now surfaces will look like they have light cast on them, when in reality the lightmaps have simply created an optical illusion, and the lights can be deleted from the scene without impacting the appearance.
Scenes with baked lights look more realistic and perform faster. However, this method works best for static scenes as opposed to animations, since light maps are fixed and capture only one postition.
When to use light baking
- You want your scene to perform well on all devices, including mobile
- When you want to present a highly realistic interactive 3D scene
- You to publish an AR scene with ultra render quality
- Your scene uses minimal to no animation