 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 hotkey users, you can press F12 to render an image and Ctrl F12 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, EV, Cycles, and Workbench. The differences in each engine are covered in the Introduction to Shading video, but I'll go over them once again. EV is your real time render engine. This is currently Blender's default engine and is node based just like Cycles. In fact, EV and Cycles can share nodes between each other. This means you can often preview your shader in EV 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 Blender's preview render engine. It is technically the same engine that drives solid view in the viewport 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 viewport. 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 EV. Immediately you'll see a sampling setting, which allows you to set how many samples EV will take during render, both in viewport and at render time. The higher the samples, the more accurately the engine will calculate your shaders. 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, Screenspace 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 itself explanatory what they will affect. To test them out, simply go into Rendered View in the viewport and adjust freely. Just so you know, for some of these features such as Motion Blur, 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 disable subdivision modifiers past a specific value to reduce the overall polycount of your scene. This is typically used to help the viewport 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 the 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 grayed 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 dropdown and it should be working just fine. Sampling works the same as Eevee, 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 shaders and hair particles respectively at render. You can see these in the rendered viewport 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 F12. Performance is an important setting for cycles, especially if you're switching between GPU and CPU rendering. Tiles are what Blender divides your image into. During render, Blender will complete the render of a tile 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 256x256. 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 viewport 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 viewport and tweak them as you like. The workbench specific settings here are lighting, color, and additional options. Lighting allows you to change how your scene is 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. Matte cap is another great way to see your scene very clearly, especially during sculpting or modeling. More matte cap 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 color and makes everything super easy to see. Under options, you'll have miscellaneous stylized options that affect your scene visually, such as X-ray, shadows, depth of field, and outline. 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. 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 engine 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.