WEBVTT

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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.

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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.

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This is labeled with the backwards facing camera icon.

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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.

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But before we go over anything here, you'll want to learn how to render.

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To render a still image, go to the Render menu in the top left and select Render Image.

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To render your entire playback range, simply go into the same Render menu and select Render Animation.

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For hotkey users, you can press F12 to render an image and Ctrl F12 to render an animation.

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Now let's go back to our Render tab and do a quick overview of some of the settings that will affect these renders.

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The first setting is your Render Engine. This is a drop-down menu with three different engines, Eevee, Cycles, and Workbench.

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The differences in each engine are covered in the Introduction to Shading video, but I'll go over them once again.

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Eevee is your real-time render engine.

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This is currently Blender's default engine and is node-based, just like Cycles.

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In fact, Eevee and Cycles can share nodes between each other.

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This means you can often preview your shader in Eevee and render in Cycles later.

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Why would you want to do this? Because Cycles is a more accurate, more realistic engine but takes a lot longer to render.

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Workbench is Blender's preview render engine.

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It is technically the same engine that drives solid view in the viewport and so you know generally how it looks.

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But Workbench as a separate render engine exists so that you can keep your render output settings for your preview animations the same

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while still being able to work flexibly in the viewport.

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Depending on what engine you have selected, you will see different settings below.

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I'm going to quickly go over each one, but I do recommend experimenting with these settings when you can.

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Let's start with Eevee.

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Immediately you'll see a Sampling setting, which allows you to set how many samples Eevee will take during render, both in viewport and at render time.

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The higher the samples, the more accurately the engine will calculate your shaders.

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Both Cycles and Workbench have this setting as well.

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Next you'll see a few things that will directly affect a lot of the visual aspects of your render.

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Namely Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, Depth of Field, Subsurface Scattering, Screen Space Reflections, Motion Blur, Volumetric, Hair, Shadows, and Indirect Lighting.

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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.

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To test them out, simply go into Rendered View in the viewport and adjust freely.

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Just so you know, for some of these features, such as motion blur, you'll have to enter the Camera View.

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Film is a setting that is shared by all three render engines.

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One of the most used settings in this category is the Transparent Checkbox.

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This affects the sky. If you click Transparent, Blender will automatically replace the sky with full transparency for your output image.

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Simplify is also a shared render setting between all three engines.

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It actually pertains more to the scene itself, but does have settings that can affect render.

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Basically what it does is disable subdivision modifiers past a specific value to reduce the overall polycount of your scene.

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This is typically used to help the viewport run more smoothly, but also has a value to specify max subdivisions at render.

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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.

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However, this checkbox is to simply enable it at render. The real freestyle settings are in the View Layer tab.

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Freestyle is also available in Cycles, but not in Workbench.

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And finally, we have Color Management, which is also available for all three render engines.

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This one is pretty self-explanatory. It manages color.

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Feel free to experiment with these settings as they will affect how your colors are interpreted for your output render.

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Now, if we switch over to the Cycles render engine, you'll see that the options we have are slightly different.

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The first thing you'll notice is the ability to switch between CPU and GPU.

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This is a very important setting for those wishing to take advantage of their graphics cards to decrease render times.

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If you don't have GPU as an option or it's grayed out after selecting GPU, you might need to go into your Preferences, go to System, and select CUDA.

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If your graphics card is not listed underneath here, it may not be supported.

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But if it is, make sure it's checked and then go back to your GPU CPU dropdown and it should be working just fine.

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Sampling works the same as Eevee, but has a few extra settings you can play around with.

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Light Paths gives you options to change the accuracy of the light in exchange for render times.

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The Volume and Hair settings will affect the quality of volumetric shaders and hair particles respectively at render.

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You can see these in the rendered viewport for testing, but Motion Blur is not real time for Cycles.

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For that to be visible, you'll have to render an image by pressing F12.

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Performance is an important setting for Cycles, especially if you're switching between GPU and CPU rendering.

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Tiles are what Blender divides your image into.

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During render, Blender will complete the render of a tile or chunk first before moving on to the next one.

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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.

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As CPUs can render multiple tiles simultaneously.

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Default settings usually work great for CPU rendering.

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However, for GPU rendering, the general rule of thumb is to keep the tile large, as it only renders one tile at a time.

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So you'll want to adjust the tile size accordingly.

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For GPU rendering, I typically recommend a tile size of 256 by 256.

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There are also a few other settings you can play around with.

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And finally, the Bake category includes the Bake button.

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This button is used to bake lighting into textures so you can use them instead of recalculating the lights every time.

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Now let's go over the Workbench settings.

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But if you're already familiar with the Viewport Solid View settings, you'll find these to be very similar.

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Workbench also has sampling, but generally it does not have to be very high, especially since Workbench is mostly for preview renders.

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As usual, if you want to see how each of these settings affects your render, simply go into Rendered mode in the viewport and tweak them as you like.

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The Workbench-specific settings here are Lighting, Color, and Additional Options.

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Lighting allows you to change how your scene is being lit.

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Studio is your default, and you can choose different presets by clicking on this sphere.

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You can also click the globe icon to rotate the light source direction.

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Matcap is another great way to see your scene very clearly, especially during sculpting or modeling.

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More Matcap presets can be found by clicking on the sphere.

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Flat is just giving all your objects a single color with no lighting.

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The Color settings allow you to change the color of the objects in your scene based on different parameters.

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My favorite option is the Random option, as it gives every object a random color and makes everything super easy to see.

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Under Options, you'll have miscellaneous stylized options that affect your scene visually, such as X-ray, Shadows, Depth of Field, and Outline.

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That's it for the Render Tab settings, however there's also much to be learned about the related Output Settings tab right below it.

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This is labeled with the Printer icon tab.

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Here is where you'll be able to change information regarding your render output file, such as Resolution, File Path, File Format, and Metadata.

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This tab is not render-entrant specific.

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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.