hi everyone, I just want to ask if there is any way to preview your render, cuz F12 takes ages. or if not is there a way to minimize the render times?
thx
You can seriously reduce render times with turning off Ray on render panel (if all of your lights are shadow maped)
for preview, you can reduce resolution (25% or 50% for example on render panel)
also, you can turn off OSA… just remember to urn it on again when doing final renders…
Actually for previews there are some options you have:
First and probably the easiest one is to hit Shift+P in the 3D Window (Camera View). You can adjust the little window to you liking and place it anywhere. And it really is quite fast.
Then you can manually adjust some settings to lower rendertime. Like reducing the size (using the 25/50/75% buttons, as…erm…ristesekuloski…said), reducing samples for AO (if you use that) or Arealights or OSA, or completely turning Raytracing off at the moment (only adviced if you really don’t need it - sometimes you need previews of the lighting of the scene, where you need AO or raytraced shadows or something - then you obviously won’t do any good turning it off). Or hide unimportant objects by moving them to other layers or turn on the border rendering feature (actually very much like Shift+P, only you get more control over the previewrender settings).
These are the things I personally use the most, I surely forgot about some other tips…
Also, check to make sure that what you’ve done seems satisfactory and worth the time to render. The project that I’m working on (a BMW M-Coupe) takes…well, I’ll just say a really long time to render. If I realize I’ve made a mistake, my computer often gets stuck if I hit ESC to try and cancel the render. So that’s my advice: Get it done right the first time, if you can. Otherwise… go get a good book.
One thing that has consistently saved my bacon, since I am still using relatively slow hardware, is to make very aggressive use of “compositing,” especially in animation. This term refers to the technique of regarding the finished image as consisting of a “stack” of effects which are rendered separately and then “sandwiched together” using the Sequence Editor or some other tool. With this approach, you render only what you must.
Another technique that has served me well is “cheating.” Which, of course, is not really cheating at all. The idea here is that, when all is said and done, what you’re going to wind up with at the end of the workday is an array of cleverly-colored pixels, and the viewer will neither know nor care how you got there. So, the easiest and fastest way that you can think of, to arrive at something that is “good enough,” wins.
For example, Star Wars Episode One actually shipped to theatres where the crowd in one of the pod-racing scenes consisted of colored Q-tips! No one noticed until a “making of” documentary actually pointed it out. You see, they’d already shown you a similar CG shot of the grandstands, so when you saw them again “in passing,” your eyes automatically substituted what they expected to see (the crowd) for what it did see (the Q-tips). That’s classic “cheating,” and although they fixed the shot later in the DVD, it enabled the film to ship on-time to the cinema.
So, you look for the simplest possible way to get a plausible arrangement of pixels in front of the viewer’s eyeballs, with the least amount of effort on your part and your computer’s. Use very-low-resolution models (or even painted shims) for things that are far-away from the camera. Minimize the complexity of the models to the bare minimum; strip out all geometry that won’t actually be seen. Be creative.