Exporting the final render

There are several quality settings to consider when rendering and exporting our work; let's not trip at the finish line. Some of our render settings will be different, depending on the render engine we've chosen. We're going to stick with Cycles for this section. Let's discuss some of the settings we need for a high-quality render in Cycles.

We briefly mentioned the concept of samples and noise in the Setting up Rendered mode section of this chapter. Path tracing engines such as Cycles require multiple samples to create the final image. If we use a low number of samples, the image will render quickly, but the image will also have more undesirable noise. If we use a high number of samples, the image will take longer to render, but the noise will be significantly reduced.

There is no magic number for how many samples we need. Scenes with many lights and complex material properties require more samples than scenes with few lights and...