# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Quickie Render

|nextText=Enter the World
|previous=Quickie Model
|subcat=Basics
}}
```
![](Blender-2.5_quickie_model_render.png "Blender-2.5_quickie_model_render.png"){width="350"}

If you haven\'t completed
, do so now. You will need
the resulting model for this module.

Now that you\'ve created your first model, you\'ll probably want to try
rendering it. Your first render, with a single light source and only
nine faces, should finish quickly. However, as your 3D scenes become
more complex, you\'ll find that rendering can take a long time.

In this module, you\'ll render your quickie model and save the result in
various file formats. You\'ll also learn how to aim cameras and create
lamps.

## Rendering the Quickie Model

1.  Launch Blender and load factory settings.
2.  To load the house model from the previous module, select *File →
    Open Recent*, and select the file you saved. Alternatively, press
     or select *File → Open*, find the
    file, and open it. As soon as the operation is complete, the window
    will load the quickie model that you created in the previous
    exercise.
3.  Press  or select *Render → Render
    Image*. This opens the
     so you can watch the
    render progress.

-   With the new Apple keyboard, use 
    to avoid the Mac Dashboard.
-   With Macintosh OS X 10.5, use
    .
-   With Gnome, use  to avoid the
    Gnome Search Dialog.

## Seeing Your Render

By default, pressing  will switch to the
UV/Image Editor window, and show your render there. You can switch back
to the 3D view with . Pressing
 in the 3D view will switch you to the
UV/Image Editor window without redoing the render, i.e. you will see the
same image as last time.

## Aiming the Camera

If you don\'t get a picture of the house, or if the picture is not
framed well, try moving or re-aiming the camera:

1.  Press  to get back to Edit Mode, if
    needed.
2.  Press  to take the camera\'s
    viewpoint.
3.  Press  to put the 3D View window
    into .

In camera fly mode, you can:

-       and  by moving the mouse
    pointer up, down, left, or right.

-   Accelerate by  forwards.

-   Decelerate by  backwards.

-   Press any key or button to exit fly mode.

(It works differently in version 2.70 and later, more like a FPS game
with possibility to slide and so on, buttons are regular FPS controls)

When you\'re done positioning the camera, try rendering again.

## Lighting

If your cube is completely black, you may not have a lamp in the scene.
Either the default lamp got deleted, or you\'re using a version of
Blender that doesn\'t provide a default lamp.

To add a lamp:

1.  Make sure Blender is in Object Mode.
2.  Place the 3D cursor where you want the lamp to go; or add the lamp
    then immediately grab it, and move it somewhere else.
3.  Press .
4.  In the popup menu, select *Lamp → Point*.

## Saving the Render

This is old information and is no longer valid. Saving the scene (with
, for instance) does not save any
renders. Saving renders is a separate step.

To save your current render :

1.  Make sure you are in the Image Editor. If not press
     to render
2.  Press . This temporarily changes the
    active window into a File Browser window. (in the older versions you
    use F3 but in the newer versions the button can be FN + S or SHIFT +
    S
3.  Navigate to the directory (folder) where you want to write the file.
4.  Type a filename in the text box (to the left of the \"Cancel\"
    button).
5.  To the left of the window, choose your preferred file type.
6.  Click  on the \"Save as Image\"
    button. As soon as the save operation is complete, the window will
    return to the Image Editor.

## Renderer Selection

![](Blender263RendererSelectionMenu.png "Blender263RendererSelectionMenu.png")
Blender offers a choice of different rendering engines for producing
images. The menu for selecting from these appears in the Info window
(the thin one that contains the menu bar at the top of the default
layout). In most of these tutorials, you will leave this choice set at
Blender Render. But it is worth knowing what other choices are
available:

-   Blender Render---the oldest renderer, commonly known as the Blender
    Internal renderer. Built into Blender right from its early days. Can
    still produce good results with the right tricks, but considered by
    the Blender developers to be antiquated and not worthy of continuing
    development.
-   Blender Game---this is the renderer used by the Blender Game Engine.
    Designed to be fast enough for interactive use in a game, which
    means there are limitations in the quality of renders it produces.
    You also use this renderer to create rigid-body physics simulations.
-   Cycles Render---for this and other choices, see Advanced
    Rendering.

## Render Control

![](Blender263RenderRender.png "Blender263RenderRender.png") The top
panel under the Render tab
![](Blender255RenderContextButton.png "Blender255RenderContextButton.png")
in the Properties window shows 3 buttons and a menu. The first button
renders a single frame, equivalent to .
The other two buttons are more relevant to
animations.

![](Blender263RenderDisplayMenu.png "Blender263RenderDisplayMenu.png")
The "Display:" menu controls what happens when you press
: the default "Image Editor" causes the
3D view to be switched to the UV/Image Editor showing the rendered
image. "Full Screen" causes the UV/Image Editor display to take over the
entire screen, while "New Window" makes it appear in a separate OS/GUI
window (similar to how older versions of Blender used to work). Finally,
"Keep UI" causes no changes to your window layout at all; you have to
explicitly bring up the Image Editor with
 to see the rendered image.

## Render Image Dimensions

![](Blender263RenderDimensions.png "Blender263RenderDimensions.png") You
can control the size of the image that Blender creates when rendering.
This is specified in the "Dimensions" panel under Render
![](Blender255RenderContextButton.png "Blender255RenderContextButton.png")
properties. Apart from the menu at the top, the settings in this panel
are grouped into two columns:

-   The column on the left controls settings for a single image.
-   The column on the right specifies additional settings for rendering
    a whole sequence of images as part of an
    animation.
    These settings will be discussed
    later.

At the upper left, under "Resolution:", we have the dimensions in pixels
of the image (the default settings are 1920×1080 as shown in the
screenshot), plus an additional scale factor slider below (showing 50%
by default). With these settings, the image will actually be rendered at
(1920×50%)×(1080×50%) = 960×540. Having the scale factor is a
convenience. Rendering smaller, lower-quality images is faster, which
speeds up initial work on your model, but you\'ll want full quality for
the final result. Instead of mentally having to work out numbers for
render quality, you can simply set the resolution to full quality, and
use the scale factor to reduce this to, say, 50% or 25% for interim
work, then set it to 100% for the final output.

## Image File Formats

![](Blender263RenderFormats.png "Blender263RenderFormats.png")

You set the format and location for saving rendered images in the
"Output" panel under the Render
![](Blender255RenderContextButton.png "Blender255RenderContextButton.png")
properties.

In current versions of Blender, the default format for saving rendered
images is PNG. This is a
*lossless* format which has the option for *alpha transparency* (which
means the sky background is replaced by transparent pixels---enabled by
clicking the "RGBA" button). This is a good format if you intend to do
further work with the image (e.g. in an image editor like Gimp or
Photoshop), but the files can be large.

JPEG is a lossy
image format, which means it throws away information that the human eye
doesn't see. This produces much smaller files than PNG, and is adequate
if you just want to upload the render directly for use in a Web page or
other such document, but is not the best choice if you intend to do
further processing of the image. It also doesn't support alpha
transparency.

To change the render file format:

1.  Switch to the Render tab in the Properties window.
2.  Look for the "Output" panel.
3.  Click  on the popout menu with the
    current file format.
4.  Select your preferred format.

## Additional Resources

-   
-   Tutorial on Using Multiple
    Cameras ←
    Pictures are missing from this tutorial

-   Ira Krakow\'s Basic Blender Camera Positioning
    (Rigging)

