Blender All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 4

Exporting and Rendering Scenes

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding assets in Blender

Comparing render engines

Rendering still images and animations

The longer that you work in Blender, the more frequently you’ll find that parts of what you create need to be split off from your base .blend file. Sometimes, you’ll have a neat little base model or a surface material that you want to reuse in other projects. Other times, you’ll find that you need to share your Blender work with other 3D artists who are using different software or building a game. And Still, other times, you may want a printable still image of a scene or a movie of your character falling down a flight of stairs. At their core, all of these activities can be summarized as “getting stuff out of your Blender file.” The important distinction is what you intend to do with that “stuff” once you get it out. In the most common scenario, the output isn’t 3D at all. It’s a 2D image or video that can be viewed anywhere. In other cases, you’re defining parts of your file as being reusable assets in other Blender scenes. From there, it’s natural to consider getting your 3D data out to other applications. These topics are what’s ...