A render engine is used after everything else has been done in the animation process. It has codes and instructions that help it to render.
What is a shader
A shader is a program that renders 3d material. It allows you to enhance how light reflects off 3d surfaces and objects. GPU’s are used to calcute the algorithum for a shader but it used to be done by CPU’s. There are three main parts to shaders, vertex shader, pixel shader and geometry shader.
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A vertex shaders job is to change values of data that defines where a verticies is in a 3d enviroment to come out as a different colour, texture or position.
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A pixel shaders job is to calculate effects per pixel. Depending on screen resolution you can get more than 2 million pixels in a frame and when the frame rate runs at 60 frames per second this creates an extremely high amount of pixels to be rendered.
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A geometry shaders job is to add and remove verticies from the vertex shader.
What is a GPU
A GPU is a Graphics Processing Unit. It is a piece of hardware created to make detailed graphics load/process a lot quicker. By having a fast GPU you can use games that have better detailed graphics without losing speed.
What is a API
An API is a application programming interface. It is a source code interface that a computer application, operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program.
Direct 3D and Open GL are both examples of API’s
Comparison of Software
DX Studio v2.1
This is a creative suite that allows you to compose 2d and 3d scenes for real time interactive display. This software allows you to import/export files in many major media formats like 3DS, X, MPEG, MP3, BMP, JPEG, TGA, TIFF, and PNG. You can also compile EXE’s for multimedia CDROMs, touchscreen kiosks, web servers, and MS Office documents directly from the application. It uses DirectX9.0 as its API for the graphics.
Blender 2.45
This has a non-overlapping and non-blocking UI (user interface) which allows you to work at a fast pace. It is flexible and fully configurable in its window layout with as many screen setups as you prefer. You can undo on all levels which is very helpful. Anti-aliased fonts with international translation support.
Windows for animation curves/keys, outliner, schematic scene diagram, generic node editing system, non-linear video sequence editing, character animation action editor, non-linear animation mixer, image/UV editing, file/image selection. Built-in text editor for annotations and editing Python scripts. Custom themes. Consistent interface across all platforms
Overview of Titles
Rhino 3D is a piece nurbs software built for windows
Autodesks Maya
Swift 3D
Havok
Ralph Eggleston
Ralph Eggleston is an art director at pixar animation studios. He was the director of a short animation called For the Birds which won an Academy Award and premiered alongside with Monsters Inc. He studied at the Character Animation program at the California Institute of the Arts. He was born 18th october 1965 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. Also in his success he has won one oscer and seven other various awards including Excellence in Production Design Award for ‘The Incredibles’ 2004 and a annie award for best individual acheivment for ‘Toy Story’ 1995
He was character designer for the animation department in – beverly hills cop 3 (1994)
Art director – toy story (1995)
Storyboarded “The Simpsons” ,1 episode in 1990 called
Krusty Gets Busted
art depeartment monster inc written (2001)
production designer – finding nemo (2003)
art director toy story – the incredibles (2004)
A follower
Ralph eggleston
As the evolution of CGI was growing and growing the industry had to too.. This is where all the followers came from. When we say followers it isnt intended to be demeaning in any way it is just a term created by Herbert Freeman to describe one of the four main eras in the history of computer imagary. The followers were people that worked for industries like effects production companies, for example Pixar. Ralph eggleston was an art director of pixar animations for lots of their productions including monsters inc, toy story and the incredibles.
A Critical History of Computer Graphics – http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/syllabusWi07.html
Cartesian co-ordinate system
The system used to create the illusion that you are working in 3d space is called the Cartesian coordinate system, the man who created this method was a French mathematician called Rene Descartes in 1637. He did this to try and merge algebra and Euclidean geometry.
The axes that commonly define the 2 dimensional Cartesian system are a horizontal axis labelled x and a vertical axis labelled y. These axes form the xy plane.The point that they meet is called the origin, labelled O.
The importance of the z axis is that it enables us to locate any point in three-dimensional space; it is called the depth axis.
Here is a diagram with the x,y and z axis on it.
3D Research 
