Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Rendering a Scene

More often than exporting, though, you probably want to render your scenes. Rendering is the process of taking your 3D data and creating one or more 2D pictures from the perspective of a camera. The 2D result can then be seen by nearly anyone using image viewers or movie players.

Rendering is very much like taking a photograph or a movie in meatspace. If you don't have a camera, you can't take a picture. Likewise in Blender, if there's no camera in your scene, Blender doesn't know what to render, so make sure that you have a camera in there.

Creating a still image

Rendering single images, or stills, in Blender is remarkably easy. Blender actually offers three different ways to do it. The fastest way is to simply press the F12 hotkey. Alternatively, you can click the Image button in the Render panel of Render Properties or choose RenderRender Image from the menu at the top of each of the screen layouts that ship with Blender.

Viewing your rendered images in Blender

Any way you decide to do it, Blender uses its integrated UV/Image Editor to display the rendered output. If you don't have a UV/Image Editor already open in your screen layout, Blender takes the largest area in your screen layout and changes it to the UV/Image Editor while rendering. Of course, some people ...