Lighting, Rendering and Compositing

Lighting is the step where you can control most of the light elements of your scenes and shots. Lighting lets you control everything from where the sun is in a shot to how much glow a light might have that’s in the scene. Lighting can add that exact feel you want a shot to portray.

Rendering is like the cousin of texturing and lighting. In the rendering step of the pipeline, you take what is seen through the camera you setup, and output the files. In order to render a scene you would first want to set up an environment, and tweak the render settings to add shadows, and adjust the quality till you get the desired end result.

The final step is compositing. Layer-based compositing represents each media object in a composite as a separate layer within a timeline, each with its own time bounds, effects, and key-frames. All the layers are stacked, one above the next, in any desired order; and the bottom layer is usually rendered as a base in the resultant image, with each higher layer being progressively rendered on top of the previously composited of layers, moving upward until all layers have been rendered into the final composite.