rendering in blender is the part where you finally get to pump out your
animation or still image out of blender and into a beautiful image or video
to see how this all works and what options you might have for this process.
Let's go into the render settings tab of the Properties editor.
This is labeled with the backwards facing camera icon.
This tab can be a bit intimidating.
So in this video we'll be introducing the important settings and
going over some specific ones in the next few videos.
But before we go over anything here, you'll want to learn how to render
to render a still image. Go to the render menu in the top left and select render image
to render your entire playback range,
simply go into the same render menu and select render animation
for hockey users,
you can press F 12 to render an image and control F 12 to render an animation.
Now let's go back to our render tab and do a quick
overview of some of the settings that will affect these renders.
The first setting is your render engine.
This is a drop down menu with three different engines,
E V
cycles and Workbench.
The differences in each engine are covered in the introduction
to shading video but I'll go over them once again,
even is your real time render engine.
This is currently blenders default engine and is node based just like cycles.
In fact, Evian cycles can share notes between each other.
This means you can often preview your shader and Eve and render in cycles later.
Why would you want to do this?
Because cycles is a more accurate,
more realistic engine but takes a lot longer to render.
Workbench is blunders preview render engine.
It is technically the same engine that drives solid view in
the view port and so you know generally how it looks.
But Workbench as a separate render engine exists
so that you can keep your render output settings
for your preview animations the same while still
being able to work flexibly in the view port
depending on what engine you have selected. You will see different settings below.
I'm going to quickly go over each one
but I do recommend experimenting with these settings.
When you can
let's start with Evie,
immediately you'll see a sampling setting
which allows you to set how many samples every will take during render,
both in vieux port and at render time.
The higher the samples,
the more accurately the engine will calculate your shoulders,
both Cycles and Workbench have this setting as well.
Next you'll see a few things that will directly
affect a lot of the visual aspects of your render
namely ambient occlusion, bloom,
depth of field, subsurface scattering,
screen, space reflections,
motion blur, volumetric hair, shadows and indirect lighting.
These are engine specific and I recommend you play around
with each one as their settings can go quite deep
but their names should make it self explanatory what they will affect
to test them out simply go into rendered view in the view port
and adjust freely.
Just so you know for some of these features such as motion player,
you'll have to enter the camera view
film is a setting that is shared by all three render engines.
One of the most used settings in this category is the transparent checkbox.
This affects the sky.
If you click transparent blender will automatically replace the
sky with full transparency for your output image.
Simplify is also a shared render setting between all three engines.
It actually pertains more to the scene itself
but does have settings that can affect render
basically what it does is disabled,
subdivision modifiers passed a specific value to reduce
the overall pol account of your scene.
This is typically used to help the view port run more
smoothly but also has a value to specify max subdivisions at render
freestyle is a powerful tool that allows you to do non photorealistic outlines
and strokes in your render based on a plethora of different settings.
However, this checkbox is to simply enable it at render.
The real freestyle settings are in the view layer, tab
freestyle is also available in cycles, but not in Workbench
And finally we have color management which is
also available for all three render engines.
This one is pretty self explanatory,
it manages color,
feel free to experiment with these settings as they will
affect how your colors are interpreted for your output render.
Now, if we switch over to these cycles render engine,
you'll see that the options we have are slightly different.
The first thing you'll notice is the ability to switch between CPU and Gpu.
This is a very important setting for those wishing to
take advantage of their graphics cards to decrease render times.
If you don't have Gpu as an option or it's great out after selecting Gpu,
you might need to go into your preferences.
Go to system and select cuda.
If your graphics card is not listed underneath here
it may not be supported but if it is,
make sure it's checked and then go back to your Gpu.
CPU drop down and it should be working just fine
sampling works the same as Evie but has a few extra settings you can play around with
light paths gives you options to change the
accuracy of the light in exchange for render times
the volume and hair settings will affect the
quality of volumetric shavers and hair particles respectively.
At render
you can see these in the rendered view port for testing but motion blur
is not real time for cycles
for that to be visible, you'll have to render an image by pressing F 12
performance is an important setting for cycles,
especially if you're switching between Gpu and CPU rendering
tiles are what blunder divides your image into
during render blender will complete the render of a tie
or chunk first before moving on to the next one.
The most efficient way to divide up your render depends on each shot.
But the general rule of thumb for Cpus is to keep
the tile relatively small as Cpus can render multiple tiles simultaneously.
Default settings usually work great for CPU rendering
however, for Gpu rendering,
the general rule of thumb is to keep the tile
large as it only renders one tile at a time,
so you'll want to adjust the tile size accordingly.
For Gpu rendering, I typically recommend a tile size of 2 56 by 2 56.
There are also a few other settings you can play around with
and finally the bake category includes the bake button.
This button is used to bake lighting into textures so you
can use them instead of recalculating the lights every time.
Now let's go over the Workbench settings but
if you're already familiar with the view port,
solid view settings, you'll find these to be very similar.
Workbench also has sampling but generally it does not have to be very high,
especially since Workbench is mostly for preview renders
as usual, if you want to see how each of these settings affects your render,
simply go into rendered mode in the view port and tweak them as you like
the Workbench specific settings here are lighting
color
and additional options.
Lighting allows you to change how you're seen as being lit.
Studio is your default and you can choose
different presets by clicking on this sphere,
you can also click the globe icon to rotate the light source direction.
Matt cap is another great way to see your seen very clearly,
especially during sculpting or modeling
more matt cat presets can be found by clicking on the sphere.
Flat is just giving all your objects a single color with no lighting.
The color settings allow you to change the color of
the objects in your scene based on different parameters.
My favorite option is the random option as it gives every
object a random colour and makes everything super easy to see
under options.
You have miscellaneous stylized options that affect your seen visually
such as x ray, shadows, depth of field and outline.
That's it for the render tap settings.
However,
there is also much to be learned about
the related output settings tab right below it.
This is labeled with the printer icon tab
here is where you'll be able to
change information regarding your render output file
such as resolution,
file path, file format and metadata.
This tab is not render entrance specific.
Now that you've gotten a general idea of what these render settings are for,
I'm going to go a little bit more into detail
about some of these settings in the next few videos