This is all heavily just my own experiences, but I grew up solely associating a "render" with 3D art, more specifically that it was the final image output by 3D software.
Then for a brief period in fandom history a "render" was official art you had isolated from its background lol
What would now just be called a "transparent png" etc
I think the latter usage came from the former - promo releases of official video game renders often featured a 3D character model posed in a white or transparent space, so it came to mean "no BG, clipart-like"
Then I saw it gain more usage as a verb to mean the step of adding shadow/depth to (line)art; this is a known definition - to add an illusion of 3D in an artwork - it just didn't get used very often until a couple of years ago, and it's useful because it's more specific than "shading" etc
But the problem is that it's not immediately clear what "rendering" means in this context, and people who don't know just see artists appearing to nebulously refine their artwork and call it "rendering", so now the definition is just sort of... "adding any kind of details/lighting/texture"
And now because "render" (verb) had kind of just come to mean "do More Arty Things to your piece to make it feel More Finished", "render" (noun) is also now being used as a catch-all term for "finished art piece that I'm not sure what else to call"
Yeah the use of render for final pieces/forms outside of 3D & video software has been interesting development
In college drawing class we'd use render/rendering when talking drawing "rendering the form/figure/hand/face/hair/etc" but it was in general for any state of it with some "render this more"
I think also the usage of "render" as a noun in this context (which I see less often than it being used as a verb) is coming in part from the past tense of render - "rendered artwork" to mean "finished artwork" (already an abstraction of the real meaning) is now getting shortened to "render", maybe?
Thank you so much for this explanation! I've been so confused. Before stumbling into fandom I associated the word solely to 3D software like Blender and thought people were running their art through some such program. Finally it makes sense!
Huh that's interesting. In my (work) circle when we say render it still means the output of a 3d software, and if we're referring to 2d art then render specifically means "shading/colouring as to push it more towards realism (to stimulate 3d)" like League of legends splash art or the like
Part of the problem is that the way it's used currently has become a really nebulous catch-all for lots of different concepts. In theory, a "render" (noun) should simply be a 2D image produced by 3D software, and "render" (verb) is the act of adding a 3D sense to art (such as by adding shadows)
"render" (verb) can also be used more broadly to mean "depict"/"capture", but that's not really the way most online artists are using it to refer to their artistic process, lol. Like when someone says "I'm gonna render this lineart" they aren't talking about capturing a likeness
YEAH I think a lot of mythos has been built up about what can/can't be considered a "sketch" and this weird pressure based on how many sketches you should be making to be a real artist etc... the idea that sketching is the same for all artistic workflows is damaging to new artists tbh
i haven't encountered that end much, i think a thing i have def noticed is around expectations of sketches being on the more developed and semi-refined side. it seems to shrink the space for looser/rougher works and raises the bar for quality high. def smth i see more in the commission scene tho
Oh my gosh, thank you so much because I have been so bewildered by what renderings is supposed to be. I still thought of it in the 3D context, which I KNEW wasn’t right after that “Before & After Rendering” trend I saw a few months ago. I feel like I just learned so much lol
HAHA you're so welcome! You're not alone! I think platforms like TikTok & art-meme trends have speedrun the evolution of the term to the point that it's hard to know what it's currently being used to communicate lol
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Then for a brief period in fandom history a "render" was official art you had isolated from its background lol
I think the latter usage came from the former - promo releases of official video game renders often featured a 3D character model posed in a white or transparent space, so it came to mean "no BG, clipart-like"
In college drawing class we'd use render/rendering when talking drawing "rendering the form/figure/hand/face/hair/etc" but it was in general for any state of it with some "render this more"
I know it as the "give a 3D feeling" like u wrote in the thread