Rendering: Faster, Processor! - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 326

Chapter 12
Rendering: Faster, Processor!
Rendering Basics
The eternal conflict in rendering is between time and quality. Generally, enabling rendering options that
can lead to greater believability costs you time. We've already seen this, particularly in Chapter 7 on sur-
facing and Chapter 5 on lighting. Recall how certain material options like ray-traced transparency with
index of refraction, blurry reflections, and subsurface scattering, or lighting techniques like ambient occlu-
sion can drastically increase rendering times.
For a final render of a still image, render times aren't really a factor. Who cares if your image takes two
hours to render? The problem though, is when you get into animation. A mere 30 seconds of animation
requires 900 frames. At two hours a piece, that's a long time. The other situation where long renders hurt
you is during the fine-tuning process. While there are some tricks you can use while tweaking your set-
tings, very long render times degrade the final quality of your image by the simple fact that you can do
fewer tests in the amount of time you have available. Let's say you're doing a project for work, and you
have two days to finish it. At an hour per render, you can only tweak your scene and settings 16 times
before you have to give up. Cut that render time in half, though, and you double the number of times
you can change something, test it, and change it again.
The good news is that the modeling, lighting, and shading processes we've discussed earlier in the topic
should have already gone a long way to getting things in the right place for your final render, as well as
to optimize the time/quality ratio before we even start to mess with render settings.
Let's take a look at the available rendering options, and see how each of these can be used to optimize
efficiency during test renders and your final render.
Render Options
Although you can render from any screen or view, there is a default screen available for tweaking render
settings, called compositor . You can always access the render properties from anywhere by setting a