Hello everyone. Of lately the rendering part of Blender has been behaving strangely.

I am using Cycles ( version 2.68a)  and I have noticed that when I am rendering an image. The output is exactly the same as the one in the viewport.  Rendering with viewport in solid mode gives out white models.  Going with texture or material shows the textures but the lighting is flat.  I went for "rendered" viewport and the result is like solid..

I just decided to try with blender internal render. My orange lights show in  texture mode. I made a render of it.  I had my polys textured and lit and I noticed that the camera and the grid line were showing in the render so once again the render is exactly the same as in the viewport. I have tried the restore system default option to no avail.

I am considering reinstalling blender but I would like to know if there is another solution out there...

thanks in advance

PS I should add that returning to cycles didnt change the interface in the material and textures tabs.. I am bit worried that blender might mess up with my work.

i havent made the switch to 2.68 yet but in the 2.66 build if you click on the camera icon in the tools panel and scroll down you will see a tab marked Sampeling click on that to open it

there you will see where it says preview 10 and render 10

you can set the #s to what you want and render

In 2.68 the samples setting has been moved to the world icon I went looking for it as well and finally found it under the world icon and there is nolonger a preview just a sample setting and the defualt is set to 10 so would follow what unbroken said above just the location is no longer the same

did you try F12 to render?

ps I'm om 2.68 and samples are in same place as always

I am sorry I had not changed my renderer to Cycles why I could not find the sampling setting in the right location 

Hello the issues I have with the renderer is a bit different. I am joining a screenshot to illustrate them.  In the top row you can see that since I didnt click on "only render" in the N menu unwanted elements show up in the renderings. ( the camera the outline of the selected object and the ray from the light object.) Is it normal? is this something to check everytime I make a render? I thought those wouldnt be rendered by default)

Secondly my main issue in the bottom row. You can tell that the light in cycles is set to have the same colour as in blender internal render. However the lights doesnt show up in the viewport and neither in the renders.

Moreover the light in the blender internal render, is set to cast shadows but no shadow ever shows up.

If the top row is the Blender Internal then the viewport behaviour is as expected as the textured view is to see how UV Mapped images appear on the object in order that adjustments can be made. Plain colour and image mapped will show while procedural textures will only show in a proper render (F12)

The lamp in the BI is casting shadows as evidenced by the black square on the forward face of the cube. Try moving the lamp to a different position to check.  I have tried to set out a scene such as yours and applied the lamp colour only as you say in cycles and everything has a green hue as expected. Without checking your blend file it would be difficult to diagnose the problem properly. The only thing I can think of at the moment is to make sure the material is set to emission and that the size is set large enough to envelope the objects.

Try changing the lamp from point to sun as this will give a uniform light as a test.

I am not yet familiar with Cycles, but both your images on the top are rendered from the viewport.

This makes me think you are rendering with openGL, which renders the viewport and all of its cameras and grids ect...

By default F12 executes a normal render, or you can choose between normal and openGL viewport renders from the render dropdown menu.

In Cycles renderer, all your mats have to be set to use nodes. (Push that "use nodes" button next to the materials settings.) If you don't do that, then yeah, it's going to render white.

Also, nodes are pretty awesome for setting up procedural materials. You may not have all the texture sets of the internal renderer (still being developed), but shaders are rather decent once you figure them out. Also node layout is nice for figuring out what is going on as as far as how textures get generated and applied.

Well they are all set to use nodes.  The reason why the light colour came out as white is because I was using openglrender at the bottom of the  viewports. I suppose it's a better workflow to test out coloured lighting in viewport with internal render and use cycles for final render. wish I didnt have to reset materials over when I shift to other render.  Thanks for the input guys. F12 is the way to go :)

I think Cycles mats are handled separately from those in the internal renderer. However you do have to build them separate, since they work differently in some cases. So you can have internal and cycles versions of the same mat, and it uses the shader setup specific to the selected render engine.

However it seems I get crashes if I use nodes on the internal renderer materials, there might be a bug or two there. So it might be best to stick with the old way of doing things when using internal render, if you have Cycles settings for the same mats.

Not sure how much that makes sense.

I wish I could contribute but you justmade me realize you could use nodes in internal render :) Sorry for being of little use.

It is my understanding and please I am far from being an expert but the internal render and cycles work completely in different ways. From tutorials I have tried to learn from cycles takes fuller advantage of the nodes editor that the internal render. Especially where lighting is concerned since they hande lighting in completely different ways. I am still learning how to use cycles more effectively but not there yet. Wish I could contribute more to this problem your experincing but have had little success finding a resource or information that could shd some light into your specific issue.