Possible to Restrict Particle Rendering to Camera View?

Is it possible to do this? I’m making a open grassy scene and I’m thinking I don’t need to render grass particles that aren’t in camera view at the current frame, so restricting the render to camera view would decrease render times. Right?

For viewport rendering ?

You could enable the ‘Border’ option in the Render / Dimension panel


Oh that’s not bad at all, I didn’t know that existed. Thanks! :slight_smile: But I was also thinking during actual rendering, considering this is an animation I’m working on. It wouldn’t need to render the whole grass plane for every frame, just the section I’m currently seeing through the camera. Or am I an idiot and does it already do this? :stuck_out_tongue:

Richards example looks like Blender Internal. Which does only render what is in the camera view. Cycles is a different story however since lighting outside the frame could influence the way the scene is lite with GI. However, my understanding is only the visible grass would be rendered and that pertains to lighting only. God I hope I’m right on that?

And, with so many Cycle users on here why I waded in is beyond me. Maybe particles is not the way to go if animating. Maybe three different blades and using instances would be a better approach. But, then again I can rarely animate using Cycles. Regardless it’s nice to see someone interested in animation on here. Best of luck.

Richards example looks like Blender Internal. Which does only render what is in the camera view.
Same when set to cycles renderer. In the viewport render with border off it renders the whole view, even that outside the camera field of view, when border selected it does not render that (looks like what is outside the camera view is shown as Solid). This will speed up the viewport render. As far as I can see with testing a scene, objects outside the camera view will still influence the render inside the camera view

cycles will take in account all geometry in scene, but you can try cutting times at material level using the light path node > is camera ray to pick a faster shader for not visible stuff… needs some tweaking though

edit: something else I just tried is using dynamic paint to paint particle length in a vertex group, you need an inverted pyramid or some volume like that parented to your camera (to act as a brush, also activate fade)…
a bit weird and not that efficient as first trick but works too

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