Oftentimes the most important thing to get right about
your render output is your output file itself.
The settings for this can be found in
the output category in your output properties tab.
This is the tab labeled with a printer icon
here, you can immediately see a line where you specify your file output path.
Simply click on the folder icon to open the file browser For easy navigation
or left click the path and type it manually.
You will want to make sure to include a file name at the end of this path
but don't include the extension
as that will be provided for you as a check box below.
Very quickly I'll go over these checkboxes
overwrite as a check box to specify that if a file name is identical,
simply override it without confirmation.
This is on by default for a reason because if you check
this off and you start a render after already rendering your scene once
the files generated by the previous render will not be updated.
Therefore your new render will not be recorded.
There are times where you would want this,
but most of the time I recommend leaving this checked on
placeholders is a great way to create the file name before the render finishes
by default.
The file itself does not get generated until the render is done with that frame
cash results will save your render cache a K A your slots as an
open Xar file which can sometimes speed
up compositing calculations in post processing.
This is relatively situational and default settings for all
four of these check boxes are typically fine.
Next you have your file format.
This should be familiar territory if you've
ever worked with images or videos before.
PNG is a great image file format to use
and your venerable output each frame as a separate PNG file on your hard drive.
Feel free to use any of the other file format options blunder has available.
If you choose a movie file you'll have
an additional section called encoding that has settings.
You should tweak
for starters, your actual file extension will be specified by the container value.
Also to make sure you include any existing audio in your render,
make sure to select an audio Codec from the drop down menu.
Quick and very important tip,
even if you're rendering an animation,
it is recommended to output image sequences instead of movie files.
This is because in case your render fails midway,
the files up to that point for your image sequence have already been output.
So you can still pick up where your image sequence left off.
However, if you are rendering a movie file format
a render that fails halfway. Will never even become a single file
as it will output a corrupted incomplete file
leaving you to start over completely from frame one
color type lets you choose between black and white RGB or RGB plus alpha.
RGB A allows your images to include transparency and
is usually recommended especially if you're rendering out passes
color depth, changes the amount of color information in your image
compression simply affects the file size of your output.
Now that we've gotten those settings out of the way,
let's quickly show how this works.
I'm going to go ahead and animate my cube really quick.
I can then render it out by going to the render menu here we have two options
render image or render animation.
If you were to select render animation,
you would see the output files being automatically generated for you like. So
For hockey users you can simply press control F 12.
Once you're rendered animation is done,
you can also view your rendered animation by
going to the render menu and selecting view animation
For hockey users, you can simply press control F 11.
Now,
if you were to select render image instead of render
animation blender will not output a file for you automatically.
As this would actually override a lot of
important frames when running single frame test renders
but let me show you how to save a single frame if you need it,
let's go back to the render menu and select render image for Hotkey users,
you can simply press F 12
from the new render window, which is simply an image editor popped out.
You can go to the image menu at the top and select save as
this will allow you to save the image as a new
file using the output settings you specified in the Properties editor.
If you don't see this new render window,
simply go to the render menu and select view render.
For hockey users, you can press F 11.