Rendering

Speed up your test renders

Learn to reduce your render settings for test renders you will be doing as you create your models. One frame in a Pixar movie can take 6 hours to do a full render. That's just one frame. Needless to say they don't do full renders that often. When you start to use Ray-traced lighting and reflections, you will notice your render times getting longer and longer.

It may not take you six hours to render an image but even a 10 minute render can destroy your productivity.

1. Go to the Render panel and set the render resolution to 25 or 30% until you have your modeling, texturing and lighting the way you want. This will cut your render time down quite a bit.
2. Don't add Ambient Occlusion or Environment lighting until the very end of the project.
3. Turn off Raytracing until you're ready for your final renders.
4. Set your SubSuf to level 1 until your ready for your final render.

Learn to use render layers

This kind of ties in with my first point, but it deserves it's on little section. Render layers extend the number of layer you can work with by letting assign a group of scene layers to a single render layer. What this means is that you can just render out parts of your scene as you build your models. Again this will save render time and give you a way to focus on a part of the model.

The other advantage is that each render layer can have its own render settings so you can optimize the render on a layer-by-layer basis. More on this at a future date.

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