- [Voiceover] Our render preview looks pretty good.
Now let's set up a production rendering.
I'll hide the timeline,
just click on the clapboard icon,
and go back to our four view port layout,
double-click on the top view,
and I'm back at my four view ports.
The render options can be accessed through the menus,
Render, Render Option,
or also from the control bar on the far-right,
the camera icon, right-click to access the render options.
We'll set up our own custom settings.
In the preset render quality section,
choose User Settings.
We're going to render to the screen
for just testing purposes.
We do want to render everything.
Over in the render quality section,
we'll make a few changes.
To speed up the rendering, we'll disable blurred reflections
and blurred transparency,
and also disable depth of field,
because that really slows things down too.
In the advance effects quality area,
we have a slider which allows us
to go from faster to better.
If we just use this slider to control the quality,
then we would probably see some flickering
in the indirect illumination in our animation,
and to prevent that, GI or Global Illumination flickering,
go into the Edit button here,
and enable custom settings.
We can set the samples to a pretty low value,
in this case.
I'm going to bring that down to 36,
but the adaptive sampling, we want to disable.
Down here is volume metrics.
We're going to leave that at its default of 50%.
If we brought it down to zero,
that would disable global illumination completely.
Then we come to anti-aliasing, or de-jagging.
Once again, click on the Edit button,
and we're going to use the default method of Optimized,
which means that different pixels
will be sampled differently.
Anti-aliasing strategy is set to automatic,
and depending on whether I render a still or an animation,
different settings will be applied
so that my test renders look the same
as my final animation renders.
I'm going set this to soft,
and that's the best option for animations.
Sub-raise per pixel determines how many times
a pixel's going to be sampled.
We'll set it to a minimum of four,
and a maximum of 32.
And the quality threshold, set them both to 95%,
contrast of 95,
and a geometry quality of 95.
Texture anti-aliasing should be enabled,
so turn that on and set its value
similarly to the sub-raise per pixel, over here,
and set the quality up to 95, as well.
This is going to be a very slow render.
A frame could take a half hour or more,
but in order to get the look that we want,
we have to turn up these values quite a lot.
Click OK.
Then we come, of course, to the size of the frame,
and depending upon your system
and how long you're willing to wait,
you'll want to enter in different values here.
We're just using the default television aspect of 16 by 9.
We could click on a preset here and do a 640 by 360 render.
If the add information strip is enabled,
we can just disable that,
because we don't need to see that anymore,
and those are our render settings.
We want to click OK to make sure that those settings
are saved and also, probably, save our scene file
at this stage,
and now we're ready to execute a normal production render
and that can be done, once again,
from this button,
and we get a little pop-up dialog
that tells us what the resolution is.
It will take a moment for the main window to appear,
because we're calculating the displacement
on the object first.
Now I've got two windows open,
and this one here, we can open this up.
There's a little down arrow,
and that will give us more information
about the render that's under way.
Our production-quality, standard-definition rendering
took almost 12 minutes to render on this system,
but we can see that the quality is vastly improved.
The cracks are now visible here,
in the displacement, and diffused channels
of the granite.
It's overall very dark, but this is
during the first half of the animation
in which the atmosphere is set to a dimmer
and more gloomy mood.
And those are the key properties in the render options
that you want to set properly to optimize your scene
for rendering animation.
If you're just doing a still,
you have a much longer budget
of time per frame,
and with animation, you have to be more careful
and more conservative in the usage of advanced features.