Blender has thousands of settings that you can customize to make your experience fit the way you work. I'm going to share with you a few that will help make your experience in this class a bit easier and more productive.

Render Settings

There are a lot of setting here just for the rendering process, but here are a few you will want to keep tabs on for each project.

Dimensions refers to the size of your render. The default is 1920x1080 at 50%. For all submitted projects, please leave these settings as they are. You may want to change the for your own purposes or if I ask for different settings.

Output is the location of where you want the file to be located. Something that is not really intuitive here is that if rendering a single image, this setting does nothing. This only affects Animated renders (renders that process multiple frames).

Sampling determines the quality of the image you are rendering. Here you can set the quality of the final render (Render) when the Render button is selected and the preview render (Preview) when the 3D Window is put into render view.

Render Layers

There is one setting here that is really important to help your renders come out awesome.

Denoising is a trick Blender uses to smooth out what is referred to as artifacts or noise. All you need to do is check the box. Unless you understand what you are doing, leave the settings at default. Denoising is less effective on darker scenes, as it has a tendency to create what looks like splotches. It gets pretty technical, so if you want to read more about it, take a look at this.

Color Management is a crucial setting to perfect the color and lighting of your final render. It is imperative for you to change the View setting to Filmic and the Look to Base Contrast. Again, this is extremely technical and can best be understood by visiting this site. To specifically understand what Filmic does, take a look at this site and video.

World Settings

World setting have the ability to produce the lighting in your scene, making it more natural and realistic.

Note: Prior to making changes in the World Settings, you should have switched Blender's rendering mode from Blender Render to Cycles Render. When doing this, you will likely see a large button that reads Use Nodes. Select Use Nodes before doing the following:

Pro Lighting Skies is an add-on created by Adam Price at Blender Guru which I mention in the User Preferences setup process. There is a demo version you can use at home that consists of three skies, but at school we have the Ultimate package consisting of nearly 100 outdoor HDRI skies and several indoor HDRI studio lighting sets. It's critical you create your scenes with these as they provide the most accurate lighting for realistic rendering.