Next, make sure we render with a transparent background: Check the “Transparent” box under the renderer’s “Film” settings.We don’t actually want to render the black background or the pink plane, so now I need to: An alternative is to create a new Vertical Split in the Compositing Layout, choose “Image Editor”, and then choose “Viewer Node”, like I have done here: Viewing the donut render inside the compositing window directly can be a little inconvenient. Tip: If your render is taking a long time, or you are on a less powerful laptop (like I am), you can go back to Blender’s “Layout” tab, open up the “Render” settings, and set your Rendering Engine to “Eevee”, which will render significantly faster than cycles (albeit at a lower quality, especially for shadows and reflections): To ensure that I have rendered my image into Slot 1, I switch to the “Rendering” tab, choose “Slot 1” from the dropdown, then hit “F12” to produce a render: Blender has multiple “Slots” for rendering, but we should be using “Slot 1”. Tip: If hitting F12 generates an image, but you still don’t see anything in the background, it could be that you have rendered your image into the wrong “Slot”. We need to render our donut with “F12” before we can see a background image. We can hit “Ctrl + Shift + Left Click” with the “Render Layers” node selected, which will automatically add a new “Viewer” node: The nodes we add will correspond to effects we want to apply to the render. We will be adding nodes between the “Render Layers” node and the “Composite” node. The “Render Layers” node corresponds to what will be rendered. You should see two nodes, “Render Layers” and “Composite”: You should now have something that looks like this: We won’t need the dope sheet at the bottom, so you can close that: When you first open the compositing tab, it will look pretty empty: This includes things like making adjustments to the lighting, color grading, etc…īlender includes a built-in compositor, which is accessible from the “Compositing” tab: It allows us to add visual effects after the render has completed. We can think of compositing as “post-processing” after a render. This file is the result of my work after following along with the steps in the YouTube video. You can download the associated “.blend” file here.You can download a PDF copy of this post here.Notes below correspond to this YouTube video.I’ll be making additional notes for each of the videos in the series! Just some notes I made while following along with this now-famous blender donut tutorial.