Blender For Dummies, 4th Edition

Chapter 16

Exporting and Rendering Scenes

IN THIS CHAPTER

Exporting to other programs

Comparing renderers

Rendering still images and animations

Working in Blender is great, but eventually, you’ll want to make the things you create viewable in places other than Blender’s 3D Viewport. You may want to have a printable still image of a scene, or a movie of your character falling down a flight of stairs, or you may want to export the geometry and textures of a model for use in a video game. In these situations, you want to export or render.

Exporting to External Formats

Exporting takes your 3D data from Blender and restructures it so that other 3D programs can understand it. There are two primary reasons why you’d want to export to a 3D file format other than Blender’s .blend format. The most common reason is to do additional editing in another program. For example, if you’re working as a modeler on a large project, chances are good that (unfortunately) Blender is not the only tool in their pipeline, so you’ll probably need to save it in a format that fits into their workflow and that their tools understand.

Another reason for exporting is for video games. Many games have a public ...