Rendering an Animation
Have we truly finished any of the animations in this book so far? All we have to show for our hard work are a couple of .blend files. Sure, we can open one in Blender, hit play, and watch our objects go, but is that the way animations are meant to be seen?
No, people expect to watch an animation as a video, a sequence of 2D images displayed in rapid succession, formatted as a digital file compatible with modern websites and media players. They will also expect each frame of that video to look nice, with lighting and shading and whatnot, and without any grid lines or cursors getting in the way. To produce such a video file, we must render the animation.
It’s uncommon for a book on Blender to get this far without yet mentioning rendering. Rendering is the last step of 3D animation, which produces the finished image or frames of a work that will be seen by others. In this final and essential stage of 3D animation, we use the 3D data in our scene to...
