How to render in Blender, step by step

Menus are named as they appear in Blender's English interface, which is the default and the one most tutorials follow. The procedure is the same in Blender 4.x and 5.x.

What does rendering mean in Blender?

What the 3D Viewport shows while you work is a preview, computed quickly and often simplified. The render is the final calculation of the image, seen from the scene camera, at the resolution and quality you have set. Everything is prepared in two tabs of the Properties editor, on the right of the screen:

• Render Properties (the icon showing the back of a camera): the engine, the quality, the denoising and, for Cycles, the choice between CPU and graphics card;
• Output Properties (the printer icon): the resolution, the frame range of an animation, and the folder and format of the files.

Before any render, check that there is an active camera and that it frames what you want to show: Numpad 0 switches to the camera view. Without a camera, Blender renders nothing.

Cycles or Eevee: which one should you choose?

The engine is chosen in Render Properties > Render Engine. Blender offers three: Eevee, Cycles and Workbench. Workbench is for technical previews (flat colours, simple shadows); for a final image, the choice is between the other two.

Cycles is a path tracing engine: it follows the path of light, bounce after bounce. Reflections, indirect light, glass, caustics and soft shadows come out right without tricks. The trade-off is that each frame needs a lot of computation, from a few seconds to several minutes, and the image stays grainy until there are enough samples. It is the engine for architecture, product shots and anything that has to look photographic.

Eevee is a real-time engine, from the same family as video game engines. It renders a frame in a fraction of the time Cycles needs, which matters on an animation of several hundred frames. Since Blender 4.2, its handling of reflections and indirect light has been rebuilt, but it remains an approximation: some lighting effects, thick glass or interiors lit through a small window take more tuning for a less faithful result.

A simple rule to start with: Eevee for motion design, stylised looks and animation previews; Cycles as soon as realistic lighting matters. Materials built with the Principled BSDF work in both engines, so you can switch from one to the other and compare on the same scene.

How do you render an image in Blender?

1. Set the resolution. In Output Properties > Format, fill in Resolution X and Resolution Y, for example 1920 × 1080. The percentage just below reduces the size for tests: 50% renders a quarter of the pixels. Set it back to 100% for the final image.
2. Set the quality. With Cycles, the Sampling > Render section holds the Noise Threshold, the maximum number of samples and the Denoise checkbox. The default values already give a clean image on most scenes; come back to them if the render is too slow or too grainy.
3. Start the render. Render > Render Image, or F12. A window opens and the image builds up in it. The header shows the progress, then the render time once the calculation is done. Esc stops the calculation.
4. Save the image. This is the step people forget: F12 writes nothing to disk. In the render window, use Image > Save As, choose the format (PNG for a lossless image, JPEG for a quick share) and the folder. If you close Blender before that, the image is lost.

To bring the render window back after closing it, F11 shows it again with the last result, as long as Blender is still open.

How do you render an animation?

An animation is rendered with Render > Render Animation, or Ctrl+F12. Unlike a still image, Blender then writes each frame to disk as soon as it is finished, in the folder set in Output Properties > Output. So set that folder, the frame range and the format before starting the render.

The whole procedure, from choosing a PNG sequence over a video file to assembling the final MP4, is covered in the guide on how to render an animation in Blender.

Setting up an NVIDIA card for Blender: OptiX or CUDA

By default, Cycles renders on the CPU. On most scenes, a recent graphics card renders much faster. Turning it on takes two steps, and the same procedure applies to AMD and Intel cards and to Macs.

1. Tell Blender about the card. Open Edit > Preferences > System. The Cycles Render Devices section has one tab per technology; choose the one for your hardware and tick the card that appears:
   • OptiX for an NVIDIA RTX card, which uses its cores dedicated to ray tracing;
   • CUDA for other supported NVIDIA cards;
   • HIP for an AMD Radeon card;
   • oneAPI for an Intel Arc card;
   • Metal on a Mac with Apple silicon (see Blender on Mac).
2. Ask for the GPU in the scene. In Render Properties, with Cycles as the engine, set Device to GPU Compute. This setting is saved in the .blend file, so a file received from another computer may be back on CPU.

An NVIDIA RTX card appears in both the OptiX tab and the CUDA tab: you can switch from one to the other in the preferences and compare the time shown on a frame of your scene.

If no card appears in the preferences, the graphics driver is most often too old, or the card is not supported by your version of Blender. Eevee is not affected by this setting: it always runs on the graphics card.

The amount of memory on the card (the VRAM) matters as much as its speed: a scene that does not fit in it renders very slowly, or not at all. To see what gain to expect from a given card, the Blender GPU rendering benchmarks page (in French) publishes measured times, and the guide on which PC for 3D rendering helps you choose a card.

Why is my Blender render slow?

The causes almost always come down to the same few: the render runs on the CPU while a graphics card is available, the quality is set higher than needed, light bounces more than the scene requires, the geometry is too heavy, or the card's memory is full. Start by checking the Device setting above: it is the most common cause and the easiest to fix.

For the rest, the guide to rendering faster in Cycles goes through each cause and the setting that addresses it. The noise threshold, which on its own decides a large part of the render time in Cycles, has its own guide: Blender noise threshold.

How long does a Blender render take?

For a still image, there is no typical duration: depending on the engine, the scene and the machine, it ranges from under a second to more than an hour. The only reliable measure is your own: press F12 on a representative frame and read the time shown in the render window.

For an animation, the calculation is a multiplication: time per frame × number of frames. A 10-second shot at 25 frames per second has 250 frames; at 2 minutes per frame, that adds up to 8 h 20 of rendering on a single machine. This is where a setting that saves thirty seconds per frame changes your day. The render time calculator does this calculation for your scene.