I rendered the scenes and then cut away part of the rendering so that you can see the complexity of the wire meshing. The texture map is a simply a 2 dimensional image that is applied to the object. Picture it like wrapping paper that is wrapped around a box or other 3 dimensional shape. This enables the wire mesh object to appear to have substance when the scene is rendered. Next comes lighting.
Lighting is placed in a scene in order to cause shadows and highlights.
This is very important since you can set the tone and mood of the environment, just as a photographer does in the studio. Rendering is simply the process of taking the information such as the object geometry, lighting and texturing and having the program calculate the data to produce an image. The time it takes to render a scene is dependent upon number of objects, light sources and size of the texture map files. Some of my scenes have rendered in as short of time period as 2 hours while it is not uncommon for some scenes to take 48 hours. Image from the Bryce 3D interface Image from the Poser 3 interface With those programs I can do any touch up if I want and apply text to the image.