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I have a character animation I'm trying to render. When I'm working on it in the main viewing window, it looks like this:

enter image description here

To me, this looks great. The water looks just like I want it to. When I render it, however, this is what I get:

enter image description here

Now the water is washed out and plastic. The metal parts are also wrong; they look more like ceramic than metal. Very little of the reflection is coming through. What am I doing wrong?

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  • $\begingroup$ You are not exactly doing something wrong, but to me it looks like the first one is Material Preview. Unless you enabled Scene Lights and Scene World in the viewport shading options, the Material Preview uses a default HDRI to light the scene. In the second image it looks like the lighting is very different. Of course the lighting makes a big difference on how things look like. The Material Preview uses Eevee for display, so if you want the render to look like the preview, you should enable Scene Lights and Scene World, this way they should be mostly the same. $\endgroup$
    – Gordon Brinkmann
    Aug 25 at 6:38
  • $\begingroup$ Of course if the Material Preview looks better because it has a better environment lighting, then using scene lights/world will make it look less good (= like the render, not the other way round). However the problem is not that the render quality is worse than preview per se, it is a matter of not having a good lighting / environment setup for it to look better. You could as well disable Scene Lights/World in rendered view to make it look like the better Material Preview, however this will only work in the viewport. If you hit F12 to render it will always use the scene lights/world. $\endgroup$
    – Gordon Brinkmann
    Aug 25 at 6:41

1 Answer 1

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Never mind, I just figured it out. It's in the View menu, and you can select Viewport Render Animation. It is ridiculous how I didn't know that.

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