Blender render settings overview!
I’m back with yet another blender tutorial. In this tutorial I will be going over some key features of a render that you can use to create your own renders.
Getting started
First I expect everyone to have blender installed, whether it be 2.8 or 2.9 doesn't matter to much. This tutorial will apply to both. Some basic knowledge will help you in the following:
- Blender interface
- Shader editor
Lighting
Lighting is extremely important to get right. Here I will go over what Eevee, and cycles do and the differences, and how to get good results.
Eevee
Eevee is great for creating very cartoony, "soft" looking renders. It's real time, which is great for viewing the scene, and making major changes without waiting hours for it to rerender. However, the downside is that the quality is less, meaning you have to do more samples. I usually do around 1500 samples, but anywhere from 500-2000 will work.Cycles
Cycles is blenders heavier render engine. It relies on path tracing which is more complicated, and you can read about it online. While this engine will look more realistic, it also takes much longer. Anywhere from 150-500 samples will work for this engine.Setting up the scene
One of the major things that you want to get right is how you set up the scene. I will go over some very key points to help you get the scene right.
FOV
The FOV can make or break a scene. The smaller an object is, the smaller the FOV is. The larger the object, the larger the FOV. This will help give the scene that one step closer to photo realism.
Bloom
I use this term a lot, and a lot of people are confused by it " Bloom is a post-process effect that diffuses very bright pixels. This mimics lens artifacts of real cameras." - Blender docs. This gives the neon glow effect that we see in roblox. It's very useful for creating lights, neon parts, and whatever you can think of. Cycles does not have this enabled by default, and you have to add it through post processing in the blender program.
Volumetrics
Volumetrics are very useful, and can be used to create fog, sun rays, and eerie effects. This can be enabled through the shader editor, and going to "world". Add in the shader called "Volumetric Scatter" and mess with the settings.
Screen Space Reflections (eevee only)
Screen Space Reflections are amazing, and can bring a scene alive. It allows light to bounce off shiny or reflective objects creating a very surreal looking render. This is automatically enabled with Cycles.
Freestyle
Freestyle is great if you want to create a scene that looks drawn. It will outline all the edges with a black line, which will add that hand drawn feeling.
Ray Tracing (Cycles only)
To enable ray tracing, you have to be in cycles, and have an RTX card. Set the Feature Set to Experimental, and Device to GPU Compute. This will enable RTX and you're set to go.
Sampling
Blender has an amazing feature called Denoising, which drastically reduces the amount of samples required, and noise in the scene. Adaptive Sampling reduces the amount of samples in less detailed areas reducing the amount of time.
Ending
I hope this can be of help to anyone trying to get into blender rendering. It can be very overwhelming with the many settings, and options that blender has. I will be adding a fully detailed breakdown of the shader editor within the next 2 weeks.If you have any questions, or anything you would like seen added to this list, I read comments daily and will add it to the tutorial. If there are any errors, please send me a PM and I will get them resolved as quickly as possible.