Difference between rendering in OpenGL and 3D animation software With OpenGL and such I can render some pretty amazing looking things in "real time" 60 FPS.  However, if I try to make a video of that same scene in let's say Maya, or 3ds Max it would take MUCH MUCH longer for it to render even though it is the same resolution and FPS.

Why do these two types of rendering take different periods of time for the same result?

Note: Yes I do realize that 3D animation software can produce highly superior images to what could be done real time. But for this question I am referring to a scene of equal complexity.
The main difference would be that with OpenGL in let's say a video game you will have a process called rasterization which basically takes care of determining what part of the scene you see.

It needs to be fast so we can experience it as realtime.

Therefore the algorithm does a few simple steps.


check if a certain part of the scene is in my view frustum


check if something is in front of it which may needs to be rendered later using a depth buffer


order the objects we found to draw
draw them by projecting them on the screen
shade them based on textures / shaders / lights / ...


On the other hand a rendering software (Blender/Max/Maya/...) most likely uses some kind of raytracing

This involves alot more math to achieve a higher degree of realism.
It basically works in the same way:


create a camera and an image plane infront of it
shoot one ray (or multiple sample rays) through each pixel
check if the ray hits anything in the scene
closest hit is the one to be drawn in the pixel finally (like depth buffer)
calculate the light for the given point



....

I'll stopped listing here since this is the point where raytracing takes off.

Instead of only checking if a point is hit, most raytracer now begins to calculate: 


the amount of light a surface penetrates
how much light gets reflected
cast new rays from the hitpoint into the scene until it may hit a light source


There are a ton of techniques with different degrees of realism which can be used to calculate the light of a certain point in the scene.

TL;DR
The gist would be that a raytracer mostly tries to be physically accurate when it comes the lighting and therefore has a lot of more calculations to do per pixel (sometimes shoot thousands of rays) and on the other hand games get their speed by drawing bigger chunks of the screen with simpler light calculations and a lot of shader tricks which let it look realistic.