Rendering

Rendering is the process of taking your scene in Blender and exporting it to a format you can use elsewhere. The scene is captured from the Camera that you place in the scene. There are two Render modes: Image and Animation. That's pretty self-explanatory. Image will render an image of the current frame you are on, and Animation will render the entire animation (from the specified starting point to the specified ending point). There are different ways to render: using Blender's internal renderer or a variety of external renderers. External renderers may get you a nicer render but add a whole new level of complexity, so I'll just be showing you the internal renderer for now.

   

    For this demonstration, I'll use the scene from the Lighting a Cube tutorial. You can download it here.

    Open the file, and look over at your Properties Window. Be default, Blender should start with it open to the Render settings.

    To the left is a screenshot of what it looks like. Let's start at the top. The first thing you see is the panel with the header "Render." In this panel, there are two buttons: Image and Animation. By clicking these buttons, you start the process of rendering the image at the current frame or the entire image, respectively. Under this is a dropdown menu that selects how you would like the render displayed to you. I don't think Image Editor is the default, but I prefer it. You can also have it open a new window in which the render is displayed with the New Window option. Full Screen will, obviously, display it full screen. Keep UI renders the image but doesn't display it to you unless you happen to have a UV/Image Editor open. You can view the render by doing so.

    The next panel is the Layers panel. This allows you to control which parts of the scene are rendered and two which layers. Using this, you can render certain parts separately to allow more control for later things like compositing. This is more advanced, so we'll skip it for now.

    Moving on to Dimensions. The dropown menu allows you to set the dimensions, aspect ratio, and frame rate to various presets such as for HDTV, TV NTSC, etc. Use these settings if you are planning to display your final animation or image on an HDTV or if its being broadcast or something fancy like that. 

The Resolution controls the (duh) resolution of the render. Changing this affects the size of the camera and how much of the scene it sees, so I recommend you figure out the resolution you want and set it before doing anything else. The Percentage Bar directly underneath will let you render a smaller size (proportional to the original resolution). This is useful for test renders, as they take less time.

    

    The Frame Range options set what frame the animation will start rendering from (Start) and wend it will end (End), and if it skips frames sequentially (Step) (whether it advances one by one or two by two or three by three...). 

    Frame Rate adjusts how many frames represent one second of real time. For example, at 24 fps, 24 frames represent a second. This is, again, something you need to set before you start working on an animation. Something may look good at one frame rate but not at another.

    Next is Anti-aliasing. Anti-Aliasing is the computer's technique to make jagged lines look smooth. Since you can't turn on a triangle of a pixel, you can't actually draw a straight diagonal line with a computer. Instead, it is a jagged "staircase" angled downward. But, Anti-Aliasing will make these lines look smooth. For most things, a setting of 8 or 11 is probably sufficient, but for a final render you may want to set it higher. This will give you higher quality results but a much slower render time. For more on Anti-Aliasing check here: http://www.pantherproducts.co.uk/Articles/Graphics/anti_aliasing.shtml

    Shading lets you turn off certain shading elements in the scene. You can choose to not render shadows, or not render textures applied to objects and others. The Alpha determines what transparent pixels are "filled" with. Sky will fill it with the Sky color. Straight Alpha leaves transparent pixels alone.

    Output sets what, where and how your scene is rendered. You can set the directory to where the image or series of images or movie file will be placed. You can set the format. For most images, JPEG will be sufficient but if you are planning to edit in Photoshop or some other external editor later, you should use a lossless format such as PNG or TIFF. You can also set the color channels that are rendered: BW (Black & White), RGB (standard Red, Blue, Green channels) and RGBA (Red Blue Green with an Alpha channel for transparency). For image and movie formats that are compressed, you can also adjust the amount of compression with the slide bar below.

    I'll skip down to the Stamp for the last render setting today. Stamp lets you embed a stamp with various information about the render. You can include the Date and Time, the Render Time, what frame it was and lots of other stuff. Might I suggest that you put your name in the Note section?

    Alright, enough of that. Lets render our cube. Start at the top. We can use the default resolution, but we want a nice full size image so make sure that it is set to 100%. Now go to Anti-Aliasing. Set it to 16 (this is overkill for this but you should get in the habit of using these setting for a final render). 

    Under output, select the path where you would like to save the file. And select an image format (I used PNG). If you used a JPEG file, make sure you set the quality to 100%.

    Now, either scroll back up to the big Image button or simply press F12 and watch it render!

    There, you're done! Now, I gotta apologize. This tutorial was very lengthy, wordy, and technical. But I didn't even go over the move advanced rendering options. Hopefully you kinda have a feel for the Rendering inside Blender though. I'll cover the more advanced stuff at a later date. For now, so long!