Rendering: Faster, Processor! - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 328

Dimensions: X and Y resolution set
the pixel size of your final render.
The percentage slider below them
causes Blender to render at a per-
centage of the noted size. So, if your
X and Y are set to 1920 × 1080
(HD 1080p), and you set the per-
centage at 45, the actual render will
be 864 × 486 pixels.
Frame Range is a duplicate of the same
control that you learned on the
Timeline window. Frame Rate
was already discussed in Chapter 11,
but it's always worth it to double
check before your final render. The Presets menu at the top of the panel holds common settings for
modern production work. Just choose your target media from the Presets list and don't touch a thing.
Anti-Aliasing: Since this is better illustrated than explained, Figure 12.2 shows the example scene without
anti-aliasing. The smoothness you normally see but that is missing here is generated when the renderer
subsamples the edges of objects. Instead of just saying, “I have either this object or the background”
and showing one color or the other, it looks more closely and says, “I actually have 15% of the object
in this pixel, 80% of the background, and 5% of another object peeking out from behind,” which it
then uses to make a much better decision about the final color of the pixel. The different anti-aliasing
levels (5, 8, 11, 16) refer to how “closely” the render looks “into” that pixel. The more closely it
looks, the better the result, but the longer it takes. Of course, this comes at the additional cost of
“sharpness,” as a highly anti-aliased render will appear soft around object edges.
Shading: These settings directly affect which portions of the renderer's shader pipeline are available. Dis-
abling any of them (Textures, Shadows, Subsurface Scattering, Ray Tracing) will cause those sections
of the renderer to be skipped entirely. You already know what each of these features brings to your
image, so you can figure out what disabling them will do. The Alpha control is crucial for composit-
ing, so we'll address it in the second half of this chapter.
Output: Decides where rendered animation frames will be stored. Blender does not store still renders by
default . If you want to save a rendered still, you have to specifically save it by pressing the F3 key
with the mouse over the rendered image, or choosing Save As from the Image menu on the UV/
Image Editor header. The pop-up menu on this panel allows you to choose the image file format for
saved renders. The default is PNG, which is a fine choice. When dealing with final animation renders,
the OpenEXR format is great. I do not recommend rendering animation directly to any of the anima-
tion formats (Quicktime, MPEG, Windows Media). If a single frame goes bad, all of the rendering
time for the whole animation is wasted. It's better to render to a series of still images, then put them
back together later as we'll see in Chapter 14.
Performance: Blender automatically makes use of your multicore processor with the Autodetect option
in Threads . Tiles refers to how many sections the renderer divides the image into while working.

Figure 12.2 No anti-aliasing.