Chapter 12: Rendering: Faster, Processor! the number of frames in your animation? Try raising the number of tiles in the Performance panel. The default is 8 × 8, but try 12 × 12. Under certain circumstances, smaller tiles can give faster results while increasing memory usage a bit. Most likely, though, the difference in times will be negligible. In the end, it won't hurt to review the surfacing and lighting in your scene. Ask yourself: Do I really need that ray-traced shadow, or would a buffered shadow do just as well? Does the subtle blurred reflection on the table need to be an actual reflection, or can I get away with a phony blend texture mapped to the reflection coordinates? There's only one way to find out, and you're the judge because it's your image. This goes the whole way back to Chapter 1 of this book. The entire exercise of working in 3D is fakery-- what you can get away with. If you maintain that attitude, it will help you make the decisions about what looks good enough, and what doesn't. The Compositor Blender's renderer isn't just for evaluating and drawing geometry. Integrated right into it is something called a compositor. A compositor is like an image processor with an awareness of what's going on in 3D. If you're used to image processors like Photoshop (or GIMP, etc.), you know that in order to, say, blur the background of a picture, you have to create a mask for it, painstakingly painting around the foreground elements so the blur effect is applied to the right portion of the image. This is because standard