blender-rendering

Blender Rendering

Render efficiently. The defaults are wrong for production; the recipes below are tuned for the common cases.

Engine decision tree

Need photoreal? Caustics? Accurate SSS? Glass-rich?
├── YES → Cycles (path tracer)
└── NO  → Need speed? Stylized look? Animation iteration?
          ├── YES → EEVEE
          └── NO  → Cycles (default fallback for photoreal)

Quick rule:

• Stills, archviz, product, hero shots → Cycles
• Animation previews, motion graphics, stylized → EEVEE

Reference-look handoff

If the goal is to match an original/reference image rather than make a generally attractive render, chain-load reference-look-calibration. It owns measurement of hue/saturation/value, object extent, glow/aura color, and before/after look metrics. This skill should then apply the requested material/lighting/render changes within that calibrated target.

Recipes

Recipe 1 — Cycles production preset (256 samples + denoise)

import bpy

scene = bpy.context.scene
scene.render.engine = 'CYCLES'
scene.cycles.device = 'GPU'

# Sampling
scene.cycles.samples = 256
scene.cycles.use_adaptive_sampling = True
scene.cycles.adaptive_threshold = 0.01
scene.cycles.adaptive_min_samples = 32

# Denoising (recommended)
scene.cycles.use_denoising = True
scene.cycles.denoiser = 'OPENIMAGEDENOISE'   # safe default; switch to 'OPTIX' on NVIDIA RTX

# Light paths (defaults are reasonable; bump transmission for glass-rich scenes)
scene.cycles.max_bounces = 12
scene.cycles.transmission_bounces = 12

# Resolution
scene.render.resolution_x = 1920
scene.render.resolution_y = 1080
scene.render.resolution_percentage = 100

print('render:cycles_production_preset')

Recipe 2 — Cycles draft preset (faster iteration)

import bpy

scene = bpy.context.scene
scene.render.engine = 'CYCLES'
scene.cycles.device = 'GPU'
scene.cycles.samples = 64
scene.cycles.use_adaptive_sampling = True
scene.cycles.adaptive_threshold = 0.05
scene.cycles.use_denoising = True
scene.render.resolution_percentage = 50    # half res for tests
print('render:cycles_draft')