Rendering your first Blender project

You need a Blender project and an email address. There is no account to create first: an account is made for you when you submit a render, and we ask for the address at the point where we have a price to send you.

Your project can be a single .blend file or a .zip containing the .blend and its assets, up to 5 GB. Both are accepted, but they do not behave the same way, which is what step 1 is about.

Drop the file on the RenderDay homepage, or open the Projects page and use Add new file. The upload starts immediately and preprocessing follows on its own.

A bare .blend references its textures by path, and those paths point at your machine. When we open the file, anything stored outside it is simply not there. A .zip that carries the asset folders alongside the .blend arrives complete, which is why it is the format worth the extra step.

Preprocessing takes a minute or two. It reads your render settings out of the file, evaluates the geometry, materials, lighting and simulations to work out how heavy the scene is, and lists the cameras it found.

It also reports what is missing, as a preflight report rather than a wall of warnings. Findings come in two kinds, and the difference matters because only one of them can be fixed from this page:

• Repairable. Missing textures, missing fonts and broken links to other .blend files, each named with the path your scene expects. Drop those files in and we re-check the project.
• Advisory. Things only you can fix in Blender: an asset referenced by an absolute path, or a simulation that has not been baked. The report says which, and what to do about it.

We read your file's own settings and fill the form with them, so in most cases you are checking rather than typing. You can change any of it: Blender version (4.3 through 5.2), Cycles or EEVEE, single frame or animation, frame range and step, resolution, samples, output format, and which camera to shoot from.

A price band sits beside the form and updates as you change things. It is a range, not a quote: it comes from the numbers in the form, so it can tell you what a job this size usually costs but not what your particular scene will. Nothing is rendered to produce it and it costs you nothing.

Once you submit the settings we render real frames of your scene on the same GPUs that would run the job, and use what they actually cost to produce one exact price. This is the step the price band could not do for you: complexity is a property of your scene, not of its dimensions.

This is also where we ask for your email address, because the price arrives by email. Larger jobs get a confirmation link to click first. The median wait is 6 minutes and nine out of ten are done within 16.

The price you are shown includes VAT and does not move afterwards. If it does not work for you, nothing further happens and the test render has cost you nothing.

After payment the job goes into the queue and your frames are split across many GPU workers rather than rendering one after another on a single machine. The project page tracks how far along it is and roughly how much longer it has to run.

Preview frames appear as they land, so you can see the real output early rather than waiting for the whole job. We email you when it finishes, and you do not need to keep the page open.

When the render completes, the project page offers the finished work: individual frames, or the whole animation as a single ZIP we package for you.

Most first renders that go wrong go wrong for one of six reasons, and all six are settled before you upload.

Send the textures with the file

Either zip the .blend together with its asset folders, or pack them into the file with File>External Data>Pack Resources and save before uploading.

Bake simulations before you upload

Particles, cloth, fluid, soft body and rigid body caches are baked on your machine, in Physics Properties>Cache>Bake. If we simulate them during the render, the result can differ from your preview.

Keep paths relative

An absolute path only exists on your computer, so we cannot resolve it from anywhere. File>External Data>Make Paths Relative then save.

Name your output in Blender

Whatever you set as the output name is what comes back in the ZIP, which makes a folder of frames much easier to sort later.

Try one frame first

On a scene you have not rendered with us before, a single frame confirms the camera, lighting and materials look right before you commit to a few hundred of them.

Watch your memory

A scene that will not fit in GPU memory fails rather than rendering slowly. Heavy displacement, very large textures and dense volumes are the usual causes.

What if preprocessing cannot read my file?

That almost always means the .blend is corrupted or the upload did not finish. Re-upload it, and if it fails again send it to support and we will look at the logs.

Why does my render look different from my machine?

The usual cause is a missing texture or an unbaked simulation, both of which the preflight report in step 2 names. After that, check you picked the same Blender version you authored in. Add-ons that are not part of Blender are not installed on our workers.

Can I render more than one project at a time?

Yes. Each project renders and reports independently, with its own progress and its own notification.

What happens if the render fails?

If it fails on our side you get a full refund. If it fails because of something in the scene, the logs tell us which frame and why, and that is usually memory or a missing asset.

Can the price change after I accept it?

No. The number you accept is the number you pay, even when the render takes us longer than we expected.