Preview vs. Final Render View

A render view is first drawn using the Preview settings on the Render panel of the Preferences dialog. By default, many available options are turned off for the preview that allows the rendering to display much faster.

When you have finished making adjustments in render view, select 3D> Render View Options> Final View or Final View with Shadows . Apply the Final View settings from the Render panel of the Preferences dialog to your render view. This creates a much higher quality image that is more suitable for printing or saving as a .bmp, .jpg, .png, .cif or .pcx file. It usually takes significantly longer to generate the final view than the preview. The render view reverts back to the Preview settings as soon as anything is changed within the view.

For faster rendering speed, but lowest rendering quality, all options in Preview settings should be turned off. To speed up the render speed even further, you can switch to Low Detail rendering mode, that draws a simplified version of the view without lighting. For the best rendering quality, but slowest rendering speed, all rendering options should be turned on in Final View settings.

The rendering option that has the greatest impact on rendering speed is the Show Shadows option. It is recommended that you don't use this feature unless you have OpenGL hardware acceleration on your video card.

When rendering shadows, a percentage complete value displays on the status bar.

You may adjust your Preview and Final View settings to best fit the speed of your graphics card and still provide satisfactory rendering quality. See "Render Panel".

To generate higher quality renderings than can be created with the final view settings, use the Raytrace feature. See "Raytracing".