Rendering and Render Engines - Mastering Blender - page 261

computer yourself, and you can set it to follow a time schedule or not to activate when the computer is running
on battery power, among other settings.
The Bottom Line
Understand rendering options and render passes. You can obtain a variety of 2D effects using plane-
mapped textures, shadeless materials, toon shaders, and the edge feature in Blender's Internal renderer.
Master It Use the Toon Shader option and the Edge Render option (you'll find them under Post-Pro-
cessing in the Render properties area) to re-create the scene from scene.blend as a toon-styled im-
age. If you're especially interested in toon or non-photo-real rendering, or you just want a challenge, go
to GraphicAll.org anddownloadanexperimentalbuildofBlenderwiththeFreestylelinerendererinteg-
rated. Google for some tutorials to get started, and see what you can come up with using that renderer.
Work with the Cycles rendering engine. Cycles has a variety of shader settings, which can be combined in
a nearly unlimited number of ways, yielding a wide variety of material effects.
Master It Using texture nodes and differently colored glass shaders, create a convincing glass marble.
UseeithertheHDRimagefromthebookfilesforlighting,orfindanotherpanoramicHDRimageonline
andusethat.MoreinformationonthescienceofHDRcanbefoundat http://www.hdrlabs.com/tutorials/
index.html .
Take advantage of distributed community-based rendering on Renderfarm.fi for heavy jobs. Render-
farm.fiisadistributedrenderingresourceforanimations,whichcandivideyourrenderingtasksamongmany
volunteers throughout the world, making for much quicker total render times.
Master It Render 100 frames' worth of the scene in scene.blend on the render farm. Try it using
both the Cycles version and the Blender Internal version, and render it in at least three different sizes.
Figure out which sizes and which sample values are too low to see an improvement in render times.