Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 14
Video Compilation and Final Output
Creating Animation Files
You have an animation that plays back with Alt-A. You know how to render. The last step in putting
this whole thing together is rendering for animation. Blender lets you choose animation formats (Quicktime,
AVI, MPEG) for direct output from the renderer, but that is usually not a good way to go. Rendering
your animation directly to a single file can be fraught with peril. Well, as much peril as you're likely to
face in 3D. Imagine hitting the button to render your 125-frame animation, each frame of which takes
four minutes to render, and learning after eight and a half hours that your animation compression settings
were lousy. That's depressing. Even if you get it right, what if you want to make a Web-resolution version,
or a version that's small enough to email to your mom? Reset the Render properties and go through the
whole thing again?
Instead, we recommend that you render animations into a series of still frames at full resolution and quality,
then bring them back into Blender's Video Sequence Editor (the “VSE” or “Sequencer”) for final anima-
tion output.
Rendering to Still Frames
You learned the basics of rendering in Chapter 12, including the suggestion to render to still frames instead
of to animation formats.
Figure 14.1
shows the suggested basic configuration for rendering an animation
out to stills.
The key settings in the
Dimensions
panel are the
Frame Range
controls. Make sure that they are set
to render the correct spread of frames. During testing and the animation process, you may have altered
the frame range for playback in the 3D view or for other reasons. Double check it before you render.
It's also a good idea to go over the
Shading
panel to make sure that all of the options you need are
enabled. While constructing your scene and test rendering, it is sometimes useful to disable options like
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