Note: Checklist Before Rendering an Animation

This is a checklist. Before rendering an animation, go through it to reduce the chance of wasting a whole night and ending up with unusable results.

This checklist comes from CG Boost Launchpad tutorial, Chapter 15 “01_rendering_the_car_animation”

• Outliner

  • Check which objects should render / should not render (e.g. particle system source objects, emitters, particle panel slots)

• Properties Editor

  • Render tab
    • Check whether features are enabled (e.g. depth of field, motion blur)
    • Motion blur: check samples
    • Film: overscan (prevent missing shadows at the edges of the image)
    • Color management: contrast
  • Output tab
    • Resolution
    • Start frame, end frame
    • FPS
    • Output path and naming
    • Output format, color, bit depth, compression

• After rendering

  • Check frame sequence; if there are errors, replace the corresponding frames
  • If volumetrics intersect badly, change Render -> Volumes -> Distribution

Below are some notes I took while watching this tutorial. There isn’t much, so I didn’t create a separate post.
(This tutorial is fairly basic. I mainly watched it to fill gaps, so my notes are mostly small tricks.)

• Hover the mouse over a value/color and you can use Ctrl C / Ctrl V to copy/paste values/colors without entering edit mode.
• On a picker with an eyedropper icon, press E to activate the eyedropper without clicking it.
• For G / S / R: press X/Y/Z once to constrain to an axis; twice to toggle between global/local axis constraints; three times to clear constraints.
• Hold Alt while changing a value/toggle to apply the change to multiple selected objects.
• Ctrl + click can extrude continuously toward the cursor.
• In camera view, select the camera, press G, then click Middle Mouse to push/pull the camera along its own Z axis.

Also recommended: AlanBeckerTutorials - 12 principles of animation