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Prerendered 3D backgrounds, movies and textures in video games are rendered by the game developer during production rather than while the game is being played. Prerendered assets (typically movies) may also be outsourced by the developer to an outside production company. Such assets usually have a level of complexity that is too great for the target platform to render in real-time. The use of prerendered backgrounds and movies was made popular by the Resident Evil and Final Fantasy franchises on the original PlayStation, both of which use prerendered backgrounds and movies extensively to provide a visual presentation that is far greater than the console can provide with real-time 3D. These games include real-time elements (characters, items, etc.) in addition to prerendered backgrounds to provide interactivity. Often a game using prerendered backgrounds can devote additional processing power to the remaining interactive elements resulting in a level of detail greater than the norm for the host platform. In some cases the visual quality of the interactive elements is still far behind the prerendered backgrounds. Another increasingly common prerendering method is the generation of texture sets for 3D games, which are often used with complex real-time algorithms to simulate extraordinarily high levels of detail. While making Doom 3, id Software used prerendered models as the basis for generating normal, specular and diffuse lighting maps that simulate the detail of the original model in real-time. A technique that is losing popularity is prerendered lighting. Complex ray tracing algorithms can be used during a game's production to generate light textures, which are simply applied on top of the usual hand drawn textures. The negative side of prerendered assets is that changes cannot be made during gameplay. A game with prerendered backgrounds is forced to use fixed camera angles, and a game with prerendered video cannot reflect any changes the game's characters might have undergone during gameplay (such as wounds or customized clothing) without having an alternate version of the video stored. This is generally not feasible due to the large amount of space required to store prerendered assets of high quality. A game with prerendered lighting cannot easily change the state of the lighting in a convincing manner. The term prerendered describes anything that is not rendered in real-time. This includes content that could have been run in real-time with more effort on the part of the developer (e.g. video that covers a large number of a game's environments without pausing to load, or video of a game in an early state of development that is rendered in slow-motion and then played back at regular speed). The term is generally not used to describe video captures of real-time rendered graphics despite the fact that video is technically prerendered by its nature. The term is also not used to describe hand drawn assets or photographed assets (these assets not being computer rendered in the first place).
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