From the course: Introduction to 3D in After Effects

Defining renderers

From the course: Introduction to 3D in After Effects

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Defining renderers

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- [Instructor] As we go throughout this course we're going to learn about something called a renderer. In a lot of other 3D applications it's called a render engine. But inside of After Effects, they're known as renderers and what renderers do is actually give you the ability to render 3D using different algorithms. So for example in this project here, I'm going to go ahead and scrub and you can see I've got an animation where I have layers that exist in 3D space and the camera's orbiting around and we have two dimensional layers that are lit up by lights and have shadows, etc. And this renderer is the classic 3D renderer. In the classic 3D renderer I can position 2D layers in 3D space and add lights and shadows. But in addition to that, there's another renderer inside of After Effects called the cinema 4D renderer. And in there I can actually create truly three dimensional objects with lights and shadows and reflections and all kinds of things and that's only made possible inside the cinema 4D renderer. So as we move throughout this course, you'll begin to see different uses of each different renderer. Now I didn't mean to imply that you can't change material options in the classic 3D renderer. You can, there are material options, but there aren't actually true 3D geometric shapes inside the classic 3D renderer. That is inside the cinema 4D renderer. So to summarize, different renderers give you different 3D capabilities within an After Effects project. And you can use different renderers for each different composition.

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