Understanding the basic settings of Cycles

To switch to the Cycles render engine, you must select it in the list of proposed engines that Blender offers in the menu bar. We will see in the first part of this chapter some of the very useful settings that should be known while using Cycles.

The sampling

If you directly try to make a render with Cycles without changing the parameters of Blender, you will certainly see some noise in the image. To make this less visible, one of the first things to do is change the sampling settings. Unlike Blender Internal, Cycles is a Raytracer Engine. While rendering, Cycles will send rays from the camera in order to generate pixels. The noise is due to a small amount of the samples. Cycles, therefore, needs more samples; the more sampling, the more accurate the final render.

The following sampling settings are in Properties editor. Just select Render | Sampling:

• Render samples: This is the number of samples for your renders. The more samples you add, the longer...