Rendering an image sequence

As we get closer to viewing the final product, we’ve been previewing it in one of two ways: watching the animation playback in camera view, or rendering still images with Render Image (F12). This means we’ve had to watch our animation in low-quality and/or view some high-quality frames that don’t move, and then use our imagination to fill in the gaps in anticipation of what the final video will look like. Well, anticipate no more! It’s time to render your animation.

Rendering an animation is a lot like rendering a still image, only this time, every frame in the animation must be rendered. When Render Animation (Ctrl + F12) is called, Blender will render and automatically output (save) an image for every frame in the scene’s frame range, beginning with the Start Frame and continuing all the way until the End Frame is saved.

The result of this operation will be an image sequence: a folder stored on your computer that...