Rendering and Compositing - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 310

Final Animation Review

Before you hit the Anim button for animation rendering or sending your shot to a render farm, it is worthwhile
to do one more round of testing on your animation. You dealt with real-time previews to check your animation
and timing in Chapter 12, but there are some details, such as eye movements and blinks, that you will not pick
up on an OpenGL preview animation. If you have the time, it is worth performing a fi nal animation review.

NOTE
To perform this review, you will be altering some of the render settings for a quick and dirty
render. If you are doing this after you have created your fi nal render and composite settings,
make sure that you change everything back to the fi nal production settings and do a full test
render before sending things to the render farm. Alternatively, you can Add a new Scene , using
Link ObData as before, and create a special set of “test” render settings. Just be sure to switch
back to the original scene for fi nal rendering.

To do so, change the output format from OpenEXR
to AVI JPEG on the Format panel, and disable shad-
ows and SSS on the Render panel. If your shot
involves characters or set pieces with large numbers of
strands, you can disable those as well by disabling their
renderability in the objects' respective modifi ers pan-
els, as shown in Figure 15.64. Of course, if strands are
very important to some aspect of the scene instead of
just window dressing, you will need to leave them on.
Turn OSA down to the minimum or off completely
if there are no fi ne details, like pupils, that matter.

If you really want to get tricky, try changing the RT
value in the Anim panel to 1 . The RT control enables
super-secret hidden features that might not be ready
for a general audience, among other things. Setting it
to 1 makes a new panel called Simplifi cation come
to life, docked with the Render panel. This panel,
which was created for animation checking on the
Peach project ( http://peach.blender.org ), is shown in Figure 15.65. It allows you to set maximum
levels for shadowbuffer samples and subsurfacing and to set percentage values for overall AO and SSS quality.
You can also specify as a percentage the amount of child particles to generate for strand systems.

Figure 15.64 Turning off particle systems for rendering

As you are preparing this for one last review and might want to tweak something here or there, you should
also enable Stamping , as you did way back in Chapter 4 with the story reel. This will make it easy to iden-
tify the frames that might need some extra attention.