I happen to think that was a great CAM. It really helped transition from RF to the Stockyards. Although i will admit it could have been a bit better. But the "No Mudakons" painting was a nice touch and the background color was nice. Unfortunately the pit with the bombs at the bottom felt like a cheap addition - we already knew how to jump at that stage.

Can someone explain to me what "rendering time" is? I have actually used Adobe Premiere and Photoshop before and I know what rendering is, but in Photoshop it's usually like 3 seconds. Why would it take so long to render these CAMs.

??? I don't remember that? Example ?

Also, this has probably been explained before, but why are the raw CAM files so wide and squashed down?

Basically when creating pre-rendered 3D graphics, you have to render them to get the final image or movie. And if you’re making high-quality images, that can take a lot of resources and/or a long time.

Pixar for example has an entire farm of computers dedicated to rendering their movies.

So basically for Abe’s Oddysee, those backgruond graphics were created as a mixture of matte paintings and high resolution 3D models, and were then compressed down to fit the game’s resolution. And those models had to be rendered, in high resolution, with computers from 1997.

What sort of computer do you have? What specs does it have? Now imagine rendering your Photoshop stuff on a computer with mid-1990's specs. Next, imagine rendering stuff on a computer with mid-1990's specs, except that stuff has been developed in Maya and has all sorts of complicated shit going on.

That shit takes time.

The AO/AE scenes would probably take a while to render if it were made today too you know :3 (using modern texture resolutions, polycounts and lighting techniques, rendered at least at 1080p)

Hopefully not too long, seeing as JAW have promised similar levels of detail, but rendered in realtime.

They will look as good, they won't actually be as good. What I mean is that if AO were to be made prerendered today it would probably be Pixar levels of quality in the images. Films like Brave take AGES to render, and thats the sort of thing I mean :3

It has very little to do with computing power now and then, ray tracing a 3D scene is more complex in a few orders of magnitudes than applying a Photoshop filter. Even in mid 90s specs the Photoshop filter would be fairly quick, a few seconds maximum, where 3D rendering an AO cam, even in today's specs, would take a minimum of a few hours.

You're right, of course. That's why I mentioned the 'complicated shit' at the end of the paragraph. I just don't know the terminology that you do. :p