How to setup fast previews for exterior render

[Ben278]

Hi everybody.
How do you make test renders of your scene, especially when testing your materials. In my case I render an exterior and when I use interactive render its to low in resolution and also takes quite long to see enough details. Of course I can switch from camera to perspective and zoom in, but it won’t fit to my actually render view, so it can look fine there but if I zoom back, it still doesn’t fit. Its quite difficult to setup my plaster material for the facade, so I think I do something wrong here. Does somebody have an advice for me?
Thanks in advance!

[TomG]

If using 3ds Max, you can use 2D Pan and Zoom, to zoom into areas of your scene (then when you turn it off, it restores to the original camera view). If I am understanding your question correctly :) You could also create a new camera specifically to inspect the material, and just switch the viewport from one camera to the other as needed.

[leon51]

Also, simplify your scene if it's taking too long on the tests. You can take the foliage for example and put it into another scene and then xref it in at render time. Also take any internal furniture and put that in another scene. Basically just strip it back to the main building and test that, it shouldn't take too long that way.

[Ben278]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will try that.

[GeorgeK]

Hi everybody.
How do you make test renders of your scene, especially when testing your materials. In my case I render an exterior and when I use interactive render its to low in resolution and also takes quite long to see enough details. Of course I can switch from camera to perspective and zoom in, but it won’t fit to my actually render view, so it can look fine there but if I zoom back, it still doesn’t fit. Its quite difficult to setup my plaster material for the facade, so I think I do something wrong here. Does somebody have an advice for me?
Thanks in advance!

A nice and easy alternative is also to render with Render Selected: Viewport selection, that way you can have any specific object selected and will render only just that taking into consideration everything from its surrounding environment and scene lighting. This option is in Render Settings>Scene Tab - Render selected.