csehz—

Rendering a finished scene to a bitmap is more processor-intensive than you might imagine. Until you click "Render", all you're really dealing with are vectors, and as you know from Xara, vectors are quite quick to manipulate due to their simplicity.

But then you add materials and lights and the program then has to calculate how the materials fit a shape in 3D, and where the light causes highlights,and where shadows fall, and then usually, the render of your shape is done left to right, top to bdttom, pixel by pixel in non-linear time. The rendering engine sometimes has to slow down and "think" of what shows through the glass, what reflects, and all that stuff.

But many programs come with a thumbnail option you can see more qwuickly to see if the full render with anti-aliasing and stuff is what you want. Vue has this option, as does modo, and C4D offers a small fully rendered image that draws quite fast. There has to be a "draft mode" in blender, no?

Usually a modeling program does a progressive render of a scene, and you can halt it at any time, so not to waste time.

My Best,

Gary