 Sampling is a setting for all three render engines in Blender at the moment, but in this video we'll be specifically talking about sampling in cycles. You can argue that out of the three render engines, cycles relies on sampling the most. The higher the samples, the more accurate the light calculations will be. But instead of explaining it, let's just demonstrate this real quick. If we go into our cycles render engine, we can play around with these sample settings. For the sake of demonstration, let's bring the render samples down to something low. Let's say 10. Now we can render out a test image by going to the render menu and selecting render image. Or you can press F12. If you look very closely, you can see that the image is very grainy and has a bit of noise. Now what I want to do is preserve this render so I can compare it to the new render I'm about to make with some tweaked settings. We can do that by simply changing the slot number. You can change your slot number by selecting a new slot from this drop down menu here or pressing J or any number on the number row. I'm going to go ahead and go to slot 2 which will save our previous render in slot 1 as we render a new test. So now we can go ahead and go to our sample settings again and change it to 400. Now if we render it, you'll notice first of all that it will take a lot longer. This is the byproduct of increasing the number of samples. However the trade off is that our new render is much, much smoother. There is very little noise and it looks and feels great. This is the difference between low samples and high samples. However, not every person or project will be able to afford the longer render times for higher samples. So let's say if we absolutely have to render a project with lower samples that has noise, what would that look like? Well we can simply shorten our playback region to be about 10 frames or so and render out some tests. Let's bring our samples back down to 10 and hit ctrl-f12 to render an animation. As you can see there is definitely noise in this animation, but there's something interesting about it because it's the same noise in every frame even when the camera and objects are moving. This can be a bit jarring and very distracting in animations but there is a value under the advanced options called seed. Seed is basically just another word for randomizer as it provides random algorithms that can be re-referenced with a seed index. But anyway, this seed is what drives the random pattern of our noise in our render. If you prefer not to have the same pattern of noise in every frame of your render, simply press the clock next to the seed value. Let's try the render again but with a different file name output to compare the difference. As you can see, the noise is now different for every frame, giving it a more natural look even if it's grainy. Now this is great, but ideally we still don't want any noise at all but we still want to have short render times. Believe it or not this is actually possible with the denoiser. Cycles actually comes with a denoising function that will help remove a lot of the noise left over from lower sample renders. This setting is not actually located in the render settings but rather in the view layer settings. Simply go there and scroll to the very bottom to check the denoising checkbox. Naturally there are more settings under the denoising checkbox that you can tweak if necessary, but default settings work pretty great already. Sampling is a very important part of the Cycles workflow and hopefully this video helps you understand it enough to get started with making your renders even better.