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3D computer graphics are used for rendering scenes and images, scientific visualizations, animation, video games, and medical imaging. They are used for realistic visualizations in architecture, marketing, and web design.
There are a large number of specific types of three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics that are used in an equally large number of applications. The most basic type of 3D graphics are used to render individual scenes or images, sometimes for advertising or other media, and sometimes purely for artistic purposes. More tightly structured 3D graphics are often used in mathematical and scientific visualizations where the graphics are the result of equations or data compiled versus objects modeled by designers. Advanced 3D software can be used to create animation for film, television or other mediums. Other types of 3D graphics include game graphics which are often polygon-limited simulation graphics that result from complex algorithms designed to emulate real-world physics, or volume-rendered engineering and medical graphics that are used to virtually explore the interior of a three-dimensional object such as the human body.
Using 3D graphics to render a still scene is used in many fields for various reasons. Apart from artistic motifs, some interior design or architecture software renders the scenes still for the purpose of realistic visualisations. Marketing companies often use 3D designs in campaigns because the rendered objects are dynamic and can be reused consistently within the 3D software without the need for repeated photo shoots. Web designers also sometimes render elements in 3D for a more dramatic or realistic look.
There are several uses for 3D graphics that don’t create recognizable objects or scenes. In math and scientific visualization applications, the graphs that are rendered are often 3D by necessity, because the datasets are multidimensional and cannot easily be analyzed in a two-dimensional (2D) graph. Weather and topography data can also fall into this category, although it is not uncommon to map some of this information onto simulated images of the Earth or to render terrain extruded from the data to create a realistic image.
One of the biggest professional uses for 3D graphics is animation. Three-dimensional animations can be used for film, television, web media and education. Some high-quality 3D animation is so hardware and time intensive that there are companies known as render farms that do nothing but render 3D images for other companies’ animators so they can later be stitched together into a complete animation.
Video games use 3D graphics in a way that looks similar to 3D animation but is actually very different. Games that use 3D graphics typically need to use models that take up as little memory as possible and render on a screen as quickly as possible to achieve a smooth framerate, which is exactly the opposite of how most animations are created 3D multimedia. Some games, however, use high-quality 3D animations that are pre-rendered and played back as video clips. Video games and 3D virtual reality graphics can overlap, mainly because a 3D virtual environment can in some cases be thought of as a video game, but without any descriptive game logic applied to the viewer’s actions.
One of the major uses of 3D graphics is in medical imaging. Graphics are used to implement volume rendering, in which techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are used to capture very subtle 2D images of the body along a given axis. All of these 2D images are then combined, creating a 3D model of a real human body that can be fully manipulated and explored within a computer.
