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Manual - Blender 2.43

[edit] Output Panel

Render Output buttons.

This panel provides many options for rendering, increasing and optimizing your render and output speed, and the location for displaying and saving your render output. The options on this panel control where and how the results of a render are handled.

[edit] File Locations

At the top are three filespec fields:

• Animation Output Directory and filename prefix (default: //tmp)
• Background image (default: //backbuf)
• FType image format descriptor file (default: //ftype)

By default, each frame of an animation is saved in the directory where the file was loaded from (the "//" part of the path specification) and given a filename that begins with "tmp". Change this or any field by ⇧ ShiftLMB clicking in the name field and entering a new name. If you use the // and do not save a new .blend file somewhere, Blender assumes the // to refer to the Blender install folder.

A background image, such as a studio curtain, a watermark, or any image may be used as a background. You usually want to set the window background to this picture, and when you render, use the background image in the render output.

Ftype uses an "Ftype" file, to indicate that this file serves as an example for the type of graphics format in which Blender must save images. This method allows you to process 'color map' formats. The color map data is read from the file and used to convert the available 24 or 32 bit graphics. If the option "RGBA" is specified, standard colour number '0' is used as the transparent colour. Blender reads and writes (Amiga) IFF, Targa, (SGI) Iris and CDinteractive (CDi) RLE colormap formats.

[edit] Scene Linking

Background scene linking in Actors Scene

The up-down button just below the ftype field lists the scenes in the file and allows you to link in another scene. When you select a scene, you will note that all the objects in that scene are shown in your 3D windows. They have a special outline and you cannot select them, but they are shown and will participate in the render. The linked scene can in turn link to a third scene, and so on infinitum; you can form a chain, linking scenes together for an ordered set of scenes to all be rendered together. This feature almost makes scenes akin to layers.

Use this feature for rendering complicated scenes, yet retaining the ability to quickly work on and test render only one major set of objects at a time by un-linking. The render is relative to the current scene's camera, so as long as all objects are positioned properly relative to 3D Space

This feature is useful for teamwork. For example, one team can be working on props and background, while another team works on characters. The backgrounds team can, at any time, link to the actor's scene, and make sure that the actors are not walking through tables and walls, etc.

[edit] Other Buttons and Options

Backbuf

Clicking the Backbuff (off by default) makes blender use the image file specified above in the backbuf field as a background image.

Edge

Edge button enables cartoon-style outlining of edges of objects. When clicked and enabled, The edge settings dynamic menu allows you to set the Edge Intensity (Eint) of the edge and its color via the RGB sliders (default:black).

Threads:

Threads enables multi-threaded rendering; great for multi-core and multi-processor systems. On an multi-processor PC, this allows the rendering work (a Thread) to be divided among each processor. If you have a dual-core PC (Intel or AMD), set this to 2 (and increase Xparts and Yparts)

Disable Tex

Using textures, either procedural or image, takes a tremendous amount of processing power. To speed up draft renders, enable this button

Free Tex Images

To save memory, enable the Free Tex Images so that texture images are cleaned out of memory.

Render Location button grid

The 3x3 Grid specifies where (generally) the render window should pop up.

Save Buffers

Save Buffers saves the intermediate layers and render pipeline images to disk as an OpenEXR file, in order to free up physical memory. Use this if you are running out of memory; there will be more hard disk cache used and hence rendering may take little longer because of I/O increases, but you will be able to render HUGE images on your PC.

	Error: Sorry...exr tile saving only allowed with equally sized parts:
	The XParts and YParts must divide the image up into square patches with respect to pixel size. For example, a 1920x1080 HD image is in a 16:9 ratio; 120 times 16:9 gives 1920x1080. So, an XParts of 16 and YParts of 9 would divy up the render into 144 patches that are 120 pixels square.

Other combinations for XParts:YParts for any sized image in a 16:9 aspect ratio are 64:36 (2304 patches), 80:45 (3600 patches), and 96:54 for over 5000 patches. Using XParts of 80 and YParts of 45, you can render a 3 million polygon image at 50% of HD using full textures and very complicated lighting (ED Scene 7 Shot 4) on a PC with 2G RAM.

Render Display

Render Display is a dynamic menu that lets you select where the image should be displayed

• Render Window (default) - In a pop-up window.
• Full Screen - Full-screen on your monitor.
• Image Editor - Piped directly into Blender's built-in Image Editor.

When rendering to an Image Editor window or a popup Render Window, the grid of 9 buttons allows you to select the location of the window, either the window frame that will be used to become the Image Editor window, or the general location of the popup Render Window when it pops up.

Dither: setting

Dither numeric field (0 is off) specifies the amount of noise to inject into the picture.

Extensions toggle button

Extensions tells blender to add a file extension onto the output file based on the format of the picture. For example, frame 35 of a series of JPEG-encoded pictures would be named "tmp0035.jpg". You almost always want Blender to add the filetype extension so that the image is "recognized" by your operating system.

[edit] Edge (Toon) Rendering

[edit] Description

A scene with Toon materials.

Blender's toon shaders, can give your rendering a comic-book-like or manga-like appearance, affecting the shades of colours, as you may be able to appreciate in A scene with Toon materials.. The effect is not perfect since real comics and manga also usually have china ink outlines. Blender can add this feature as a post-processing operation.

[edit] Options

Toon edge buttons (F10).

Edge

This makes Blender search for edges in your rendering and add an 'outline' to them.

Toon edge settings (F10).

Before repeating the rendering it is necessary to set some parameters. The Edge Settings opens a window to set these (Toon edge settings (F10).). Edge Settings

Colour / R/G/B

The colour of the rendered edges (black by default). Use the sliders or click on the swatch to see the color picker

Eint

The edge's intensity from 0 to 255. 10 gives outline of object against the background, whereas higher settings start to pick up forward or leading edges based on the contrast in the image caused by the geometry of the object and not specular spots caused by lighting. At maximum intensity, Edge will even faintly display geometry subsurf edge lines in areas of imperfect smoothing.

[edit] Examples

Scene re-rendered with toon edge set.

It is possible to separate out the edge layer using a renderlayer dedicated to that purpose. The alpha channel is 0 where there is no edge, and 1 where the edge is. By separating out the edge layer, you can blur it, change its color, mask it, etc. The image to the right shows how to do this. I created an Edge renderlayer that only has the Sky and Edge layers (I included sky so that we get the world color later on in the composite output). The other renderlayer omits the Edge layer, so it returns just the normal image. On the output panel I enabled Edge with a width of 10 in black. I run that layer through a blur node. Using the Alphaover node, I then composite the cube on top of the blurred edge. The result gives a soft-shadow kind of effect. Note that Premultiply is set because the Edge image already has an alpha of 1.0 set.

Manual