by Ray Mairlot·Rendering
Images © Ray Mairlot. Used for product review; image policy.
Animated Render Border sits at rank 342 in the superhive library. It earns its place by extending Blender's own region rendering into animation, so the boxed area follows your subject frame by frame instead of staying fixed.
Blender includes a region render feature (formerly called border rendering) that lets you box off part of the camera view and skip rendering everything outside it. That works for still frames, but not for animations where the object of interest moves across the screen. Animated Render Border makes the render region adaptive, updating its location and size every frame to stay wrapped around the selected object or collection.
The add-on can track objects two ways: a bounding box mode, or a more precise mode that analyses the inner points of an object such as vertices, lattice points and curve points, which is slower with complex objects. An adjustable margin property adds padding around tracked objects, and a Keyframe mode lets you manually place and keyframe the region instead of tracking an object.
Tracking supports Meshes, Text, Curves, Lattices, Armatures, Bones, Surfaces and Meta objects, and geometry generated by modifiers can be tracked in bounding box mode. Both the 2.79 and 2.8+ versions of the add-on are included.
Animated Render Border is best for focusing render power on a moving object during test renders, and skipping empty or transparent-background areas that would otherwise still take time to process.
Animated Render Border is completely free to download and use.
Animated Render Border was originally built for Blender 2.74, then updated for 2.79, and later updated to work with Blender 2.8 and newer. Both the 2.79 and 2.8+ versions of the add-on are included together, and currently there is no difference in features between the two. If you're on a recent Blender release, the 2.8+ version is the one that applies. For the exact current compatibility and any newer updates, check Ray Mairlot's developer page before installing.
Animated Render Border only supports image formats as a render output. That means you can render to a JPG image sequence, for example, but not directly to an MP4 video. This is a stated limitation of the add-on, so keep it in mind when planning test renders or final output through the tool. Video containers aren't available directly. For the full list of limitations and any changes in newer versions, the developer's page is the place to look.
Animated Render Border tracking won't work when a camera is set to use a Panoramic lens type, such as Equirectangular or Mirror Ball. Aside from that, it tracks a wide range of object types, including Meshes, Text, Curves, Lattices, Armatures, Bones, Surfaces and Meta objects, and geometry generated by modifiers can be tracked in bounding box mode. If your setup relies on a panoramic camera, the adaptive region tracking won't function as expected.
Animated Render Border is listed as free in this catalog. Because the two Blender versions of the add-on are bundled together and licensing terms can change over time, check Ray Mairlot's developer page for the current details before downloading. There you'll also find the documentation, and a demo video is available if you want to see more of the add-on before installing it.
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