print size/rendering question

[spanish pants]

hey all, i´ve been asked to render out some images of a residential building i´ve been working on. The client wants renders for print and billboard.

The background foto plates i was sent to comp the building on are 3504 X 2336 and 4420 x 1000. Is this sufficient for size for print and and billboard size. I´m just a little confused at this point.

[STRAT]

depends how big your bill boards are.

 

3500-4000 pixels isn't a bad size to play with, but it'll probably be too small. but what ever you do dont re-size the photos upwards if you can avoid it, they'll look really pants.

 

If your billboards are only a meter or 2 long they those plate should be fine (not perfect, but acceptable). anything much bigger and you'll notice the quality drop. but hey, i've used photos smaller than that before to use on a billboard 5 meters square, which obviously looks a tad ropey, but most peeps stands enough distance in front of them anyway to make them look half decent.

 

also, there's a fair few previous posts on this topic here you might want to search out

[spanish pants]

Hey Strat, thanks for the quick reply. I don´t think the client took alot of this into consideration when they shot the bg plates. As far as resizing an image, i´m only comfortable going up 10 to 15 % and even then it´s an option that doesn´t appeal to me. The images should be ok for A4 so it´s ok there.

 

I´ve asked the client (who btw should know more about the process of arch viz, seeing as how he´s been at it alot longer) for more specifics. Let´s see how large he wants these pics to be.

 

Thanks again Strat, muchly appreciated.

[Eric]

What will be the viewing distance? A simple test is to open the photos in photoshop and resize the photos (without resampling them) to the actual print size of the billboard. Then print a cropped portion at 100% scale at the largest paper size you have available to you. You might do this with various areas of your image if necessary to get a better feel for it. Then stand back and look at the prints from the actual viewing distance. You might be shocked to find out how low you can take the PPI resolution.

[spanish pants]

Hey Eric thanks, i´ll file this tip away for future use.

The client got back to me last night with his requirements. He would like a minimum of a 4000 vertical pixel rendering. I can render anything up to 3000 vertical pixels, anyting larger and either my machine crashes as soon as i hit the render button or as soon as it renders i get the "error creating bitmap" popup.

I´m using 3dmax and vray 1.5 on a 2.4 ghz core duo with 2 gigs of ram. I can´t go out and get another gig till tomorrow because of a silly holiday today. Any ideas?

[STRAT]

The client got back to me last night with his requirements. He would like a minimum of a 4000 vertical pixel rendering.

 

you're quite lucky. thats pretty small for a billboard. 4000 vertical would give you about 6-7000 horizontal maybe. smaller than ideal, but very usable.

 

 

I can render anything up to 3000 vertical pixels, anyting larger and either my machine crashes as soon as i hit the render button or as soon as it renders i get the "error creating bitmap" popup.

I´m using 3dmax and vray 1.5 on a 2.4 ghz core duo with 2 gigs of ram. I can´t go out and get another gig till tomorrow because of a silly holiday today. Any ideas?

 

that spec is more than ample to render double that size. i render treble that size on my 4 year old xeons with 1 gig of ram. the trick is for you to optomise your scene more and turn down the render settings. you can always add to the reality and lighting in post.

[SandmanNinja]

Hey Eric thanks, i´ll file this tip away for future use.

The client got back to me last night with his requirements. He would like a minimum of a 4000 vertical pixel rendering. I can render anything up to 3000 vertical pixels, anyting larger and either my machine crashes as soon as i hit the render button or as soon as it renders i get the "error creating bitmap" popup.

I´m using 3dmax and vray 1.5 on a 2.4 ghz core duo with 2 gigs of ram. I can´t go out and get another gig till tomorrow because of a silly holiday today. Any ideas?

 

I tried to render a 4000x2000 image just this morning and got that message.

 

We have identical machines.

 

So, I changed my V-Ray Irradiance map rollout - built-in presets - to go from VERY HIGH to MEDIUM, and then changed the HSPh. subdivs from 50 down to 30.

 

I hit render and the render was done about 8 minutes later!!

[spanish pants]

Hey guys,

 

Thanks for the responses. I figured out what my problems was. I had the vray framebuffer turned on, doh!!! As soon as i unchecked it i was able to render out to the desired size. ´

You´ll have to forgive the complete newbie question. If i add more ram i assume this should let me render larger images to the frambuffer, no?

 

Just to add to this. It´s a small scene, just a 5 storey building for comping onto a bg plate. No heavy geometry, no unecesary details, or complex textures, but it does have a few glossy reflections which are the part of teh problem.

[MAGANGLO]

Hi

 

I've done a couple of billboard images, I used about 8000x6000 pixels

somebody told me that a standard billboard will only be about 25-35 dpi at

full size, but if your image is a few meters long this will still crerate a very large file size.

 

You may also consider using the psb format in photoshop for post production

for very large scale images

 

If you have problems rendering at this size, go to

customise\preferences\rendering tab and turn on the 'bitmap pager'

this will get rid of the 'error creating bitmap' message