The render node

The Render node is where your 3D scene becomes a picture — it gathers everything in front of the camera, lights it, and hands back an image.

The Render node is the single crossing point from a 3D scene to flat pixels. Cameras are just viewpoints and lights are just lights — nothing turns into an actual image until a Render node does it. Feed it your scene, choose a camera, and it gives you a finished frame you can composite, grade, or export.

What it does

When the Render node cooks, it walks the whole scene once: it draws every solid object, casts shadows, adds ambient occlusion and any reflections, then lights everything in one pass. After that it layers in the see-through things — volumes, Gaussian splats, glass and refraction, glowing and unlit surfaces — over the lit result. Finally it runs your post effects and tone-maps the bright, wide-range image down to something your display can show.

You don't have to think about that order. You wire a scene in and get an image out. But it's worth knowing the shape of it, because it explains why some things composite over others (a transparent object always lands on top of the solid scene behind it) and why effects like Bloom or Depth of Field apply to the finished frame.

Choosing a camera

The Render node renders through a camera. Leave its camera input empty and it uses the active viewport camera, so the render follows however you orbit and zoom. Wire a Camera into it and the render locks to that viewpoint instead — useful for a fixed shot, a second angle, or a result you'll export.

See Cameras for setting up and animating cameras, and Choosing a renderer for picking which renderer draws the scene.

Output passes

Beyond the final lit colour, the Render node can also hand out the extra information it computed along the way: depth (how far each pixel is from the camera), surface normals (which way each surface faces), and world position. These are the building blocks for compositing tricks — fog by depth, relighting, masking by position — without re-rendering.

Turn on only the passes you need. Each one is extra work, so leaving them off keeps the render lean.

Parameters

See also

• Choosing a renderer

• Cameras

• Lights

• Post effects

• Rasterizing

• Working in 2D and 3D