It's an offline 3D rendering software that turns a scene description into a photorealistic image. Usually such a description is for a single frame of animation.
Offline being the opposite of realtime. I.e. a frame taking possibly hours to render whereas in a realtime renderer it must take fractions of a second.
Maybe think of it like a physical camera in a movie. And a very professional one for that. But then a camera doesn't get you very far if you consider the list of people you see when credits roll by. :]
Similarly, at the very least, you need something to feed the renderer a 3D scene, frame by frame. Usually this is a DCC app like Maya, Houdini etc. or something created in-house. That's where you do your animation. After you created the stuff you want to animate and the sets where that lives ... etc., etc.
Moonray has a Hydra USD delegate. That is an API to send such 3D scenes to a renderer. There is one for Blender too[1]. That would be one way to get data in there, I'd reckon.
Offline being the opposite of realtime. I.e. a frame taking possibly hours to render whereas in a realtime renderer it must take fractions of a second.
Maybe think of it like a physical camera in a movie. And a very professional one for that. But then a camera doesn't get you very far if you consider the list of people you see when credits roll by. :]
Similarly, at the very least, you need something to feed the renderer a 3D scene, frame by frame. Usually this is a DCC app like Maya, Houdini etc. or something created in-house. That's where you do your animation. After you created the stuff you want to animate and the sets where that lives ... etc., etc.
Moonray has a Hydra USD delegate. That is an API to send such 3D scenes to a renderer. There is one for Blender too[1]. That would be one way to get data in there, I'd reckon.
Hope that makes sense.
[1] https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/BlenderUSDHydraA...