Animation Drafts

In order to quickly validate your animations, you can easily render out viewport previews by checking the draft checkbox.

The Workbench render engine will be used for fast rendering, textures are visible but lighting is pretty basic.

By default, previews will be saved as movies (H264 codec, MP4 format).

If you are usually using image sequences and you want previews to use the same output settings as final renders (e.g. create placeholder images to be used in an other compositing software)

You can disable that in the settings panel.

This means file format (PNG, FFmpeg…) and file output path will remain the same for final renders and previews.

Attention

Be aware that you may overwrite final renders when unchecking Render drafts as movies

Example preview

Drafts are very fast to render and are viewport-like quality.