Quick and Easy Blender Viewport Render

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to create a clean, quick viewport render in Blender. It’s simple, fast, and perfect for sharing your work-in-progress without waiting on long render times. Let’s jump in!

Step 1: Set Up EEVEE

We’ll start by making sure Blender is ready to give us a clean viewport render.

• Go to Render Properties and set the engine to EEVEE.
  This is the best option for quick renders.
• Increase Viewport Samples to around 100.
  Higher samples reduce noise in your preview. However going too high will slow things down without much visible improvement for a quick render.
• Enable Raytracing for more accurate lighting and reflections.

Next, we’ll make sure your colours pop the way you want them to.

• In Colour Management, leave View Transform set to Standard.
  Standard works best for non-photorealistic or stylised results. For realism, try AgX (newer, film-like) or the older Filmic (high dynamic range).
• Change Look to High Contrast or Very High Contrast.
  Experiment until your scene looks right.

Step 2: Use Material Preview Mode

To see your materials with environment lighting, switch to Material Preview.

• Click the Material Preview shading mode at the top-right of the viewport.
• This loads Blender’s predefined HDRIs to simulate realistic lighting.

Step 3: Hide Overlays

Before rendering, we need to clean up the viewport.

• Toggle Overlays off (top-right of the viewport).
  This hides things like gizmos, grids, the 3D cursor, and preview spheres.

Step 4: Render and Save

Now everything is ready to capture your scene!

• Go to the top menu → View → Viewport Render Image.
• A new window will open with your snapshot of the active viewport.
• From there, go to Image → Save As to save your file.