How to speed up rendering in Blender Render

Learn how to speed up rendering in Blender Render to create engaging and high-quality 3D graphics and animation.

5 min read

Emmanuel Ohiri

Jul 31, 2023, 10:00 AM

Speed is essential in 3D modelling and animation. The quicker you can render your creations, the more time you have for perfecting designs and bringing your ideas to life. Blender Render, a component of the open-source 3D creation suite Blender, is a potent tool for artists and designers. It lets you bring your 3D models, characters and animations to life and is designed to deliver speed and efficiency in creating still imagery and animations. Rendering in Blender involves calculating light paths, shadows, reflections, and other visual effects, which can be computationally intensive.

Moreover, the rendering process can be time-consuming, especially for complex scenes, as they typically require more calculations. This is where optimisation comes into play. This post offers tips for significantly speeding up your rendering process in Blender Render by tweaking a few settings and leveraging the right resources.

Get to Know Your Render Options

Blender Render provides three main types of render engines - the Blender Render (Eevee), Cycles and Workbench. The Eevee is a real-time renderer, excellent for non-photorealistic rendering. Cycles is an offline path tracer that offers physically accurate rendering.

Workbench is designed for simple layout modelling and previews. It is not recommended as a final rendering engine but can be used to display your work while modelling in the 3D viewport.

Eevee and Cycles are the predominantly used render engines in Blender. Your choice between these may depend on your project requirements. Both Eevee and Cycles are equally capable of providing real-time previews. However, Cycles is more compute-intensive due to its accuracy in calculating and rendering object shading, shadows and lighting.

Generally, Blender Render (Eevee) is faster but more basic and less realistic, while Cycles is slower but provides high-quality results.

Utilise the Power of Hardware

We’ve previously discussed the critical importance of hardware in the rendering process. To optimise this further, you can leverage the robust resources of CUDO Compute’s Cloud platform. The better your hardware, the faster the rendering. Blender Render allows you to choose between CPU and 'GPU', 'software' for rendering. GPUs, with their multiple cores, can often render faster than CPUs. Ensure you've selected the proper hardware in your user preferences.

Leveraging Blender's Features

Blender Render comes with features designed to speed up your rendering process. For instance, the 'Simplify' option in the render settings can automatically reduce the complexity of your scene for faster rendering. Similarly, you can use the 'Bake' function to pre-calculate certain scene elements, saving valuable time during rendering. Several features can help speed up your rendering process:

• Rendering Engine: While Blender Render - Eevee - is known for its speed, you can also use the Cycles engine for more realistic results. Cycles is slower but uses advanced algorithms for greater accuracy.
• GPU Rendering: If your system has a compatible GPU, you can render your scenes in Blender. GPUs can process certain tasks faster than CPUs, potentially speeding up your rendering times.
• Render Farms: Consider using a render farm for complex scenes or animations. These services offer vast amounts of computing power to render your projects quickly.
• Cloud Rendering: Cloud rendering is a technique that leverages cloud computing's power to perform rendering tasks. This technique provides multiple benefits, including increased rendering speed, cost savings, easy scalability, and faster turnaround time. It can render multiple files simultaneously, saving significant time compared to local machines.

Tips to Speed Up Rendering in Blender

• Simplify Your Scene: Less is more when it comes to rendering speed. Remove any unnecessary objects, lower the polygon count, and use simpler materials where possible. The less complex your scene, the faster Blender can calculate and render it.
• Use Baked Textures: Baking is a process that allows you to save computed data into texture maps. This means Blender won't have to compute that data every time you render, speeding up the process.
• Optimise Light Sources: Reducing the number of light sources in your scene can significantly speed up the rendering process. Try to use fewer lights and consider using environmental lighting for large scenes.
• Use Render Layers: Blender allows you to render different parts of your scene separately using render layers. This way, you can focus your computing resources on complex aspects of your scene whilst rendering the less complex elements quickly.
• Adjust Render Settings: Blender offers a wealth of settings that can be tweaked to improve rendering speed. For example, reducing the sample rate or resolution can make rendering faster, though at the cost of some detail.

Related: 7 Security considerations for Cloud storage and processing

Cloud Rendering vs Local Rendering in Blender

A comparison of Blender's local versus cloud-based rendering reveals a discernible difference in performance. Cloud rendering can bring multiple servers online, substantially increasing rendering speed. Alternatively, the number of cores (threads) on a local machine can either slow or speed up the rendering process.

As we have previously discussed, when it comes to cost-effectiveness, cloud rendering emerges as a budget-friendly solution. High-end workstations are costly, and maintaining a local render farm requires significant investment in hardware, IT infrastructure setup and maintenance, and software licences. In contrast, cloud rendering services typically operate a pay-as-you-go model, meaning you only pay for what you use.

Harness the Cloud with CUDO Compute

Rendering complex 3D scenes can be resource-intensive, and your local hardware may not be up to the task. This is where cloud computing platforms like CUDO Compute come in. CUDO Compute lets you offload your rendering tasks to our powerful cloud servers, freeing up your local resources and speeding up the rendering process.

With CUDO Compute, you can access high-performance GPUs that can handle intensive tasks like rendering effortlessly. Plus, the platform offers scalability, allowing you to allocate more resources when needed, making it a cost-effective solution for all scales of projects.

CUDO Compute with Blender Render, sign up for an account, integrate it with Blender Render following the provided instructions, allocate the necessary resources, and start rendering. With CUDO Compute, you can drastically reduce your rendering times without altering your workflow significantly.

Perfecting using Blender Render to achieve quicker rendering times is a multifaceted process. It requires a deep understanding of your render settings, effectively utilising your hardware capabilities, and strategically simplifying your scenes. Also, taking full advantage of Blender's in-built features is essential to expedite the rendering process. A significant game-changer is the ability to harness the immense power of cloud computing with CUDO Compute. These strategies collectively contribute to a more efficient rendering process, allowing you more time to refine your designs and realise your creative vision. Get in touch to find out how we can help optimise your creative workloads.

About CUDO Compute

CUDO Compute is a fairer cloud computing platform for everyone. It provides access to distributed resources by leveraging underutilised computing globally on idle data centre hardware. It allows users to deploy virtual machines on the world’s first democratised cloud platform, finding the optimal resources in the ideal location at the best price.

CUDO Compute aims to democratise the public cloud by delivering a more sustainable economic, environmental, and societal model for computing by empowering businesses and individuals to monetise unused resources.

Our platform allows organisations and developers to deploy, run and scale based on demands without the constraints of centralised cloud environments. As a result, we realise significant availability, proximity and cost benefits for customers by simplifying their access to a broader pool of high-powered computing and distributed resources at the edge.

Learn more: Website, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Get in touch.