OpenGL Render

This entry covers a quick tip on faster rendering, specifically as it pertains to faster (draft) rendering.  By using OpenGL Rendering, Blender uses the view that you see in the viewport, but with your camera to render a light weight version of your scene.  

In most cases this is most applicable to animation.  If your scene takes forever to render, or if your animation plays slowly in the viewport, you can do a fast render without changing any render or object settings.  

First we'll start with a reasonably detailed scene, with some smoothed monkeys and a textured floor.  

If we perform an OpenGL render of the scene, notice the camera view is the same, but the lighting and the textures are missing (as seen in the viewport).

This type of render can be found at the top left near the top level menu under the Render menu.  Use the OpenGL Render Image to render the current frame, and OpenGL Render Animation to render your entire animation.

Below is the short clip of an animation generated from the OpenGL render.