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Need advice fast! Render Resolution to print a 33ft x 10ft poster


danb4026
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Photoshop won't even let you have a document that big without using the .PSB large document format. Unless you do it in sections I suppose. If it was a photo and not a render, then you would be hard pushed to find a camera that would go beyond 6000px wide. I've never had to produce anything of that scale before, but my gut feeling is that asking you to produce anything over 10,000px wide is unreasonable.

 

That probably doesn't help you any though :)

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Not sure this is the answer to your question, but I have rendered a 25,000 pixel wide image with mr before...

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/34983-backburner-hanging-very-high-res-image.html

 

The image was going to be printed on a very high quality printer, and would be viewed from a distance of 3 - 4 ft. I think the final was roughly 24' wide, but I can not remember exactly.

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Hmmmm.....well what do you think a reasonable render size should be? They will just have to deal with it the best they can. This is a huge poster being placed inside a window along 42nd street in NYC. It is going to block the view of interior construction as well.

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DPI is just the same as PPI. DPI is only relevent if youre talking to a print guy about ink. Keeping everything in pixels when doing the math is helpful. So.....

33' x 12" = 396" across. 396" @ 100ppi = 39600 pixel image is requested by the client.

Get as close to that as you can. If you can, render in regions then clip together in Photoshop.

And yes, find out how close people will view the print from. If its going to be more than 10 feet away, you can for sure go lower than 100 ppi. But until you know that, try to hit what they've asked for. I had to render the sea for a Corona booth print ad once, I think that was about 40k pixels across. I rendered it in two sections and pasted in together in PS.

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Wow, I'll be interested to see how this turns out. It sounds like what they're asking for is unreasonable. I can't see how it's possible to get an old file in proper order and then rerender it at 30,000px to be ready to print today. My suggestion would be to simply take what you've got and upsize it to the resolution you want (I'd recommend using Irfanview and set the resample method to B-Spline. Obviously you won't be adding information but given the circumstances I think it's the best you can do unless they're willing to wait.

 

If it's going up in a window then I suspect the main people seeing it are going to be driving by about 15' away so you shouldn't need all the info a 100ppi image would give you.

 

You might test this by upsampling your image to 30,000px +/- and then printing just a section of it out as large as you can, then tape it to a wall and stand 5-15' away and see how it looks.

 

-Brodie

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eek, inside a window in nyc, it will probably need to be pretty damn large, also think about the fact that you probably initially set up the amount of detail in the textures/models to be viewed max 5' wide, so at some point raising the resolution of the render out of max is running up against diminishing returns, past a certain point, all you'll be gaining will be sharper edges and more visible jpg artifacting in your textures ;)

 

Get it rendering as large as your time budget will allow basically, at the least to half of the requested size, from there, resizing up and resharpening as you can isn't toooooo much of a losing proposition.

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It was originally rendered out at 4000x1333 a long time ago. Yesterday I wasl told that they wanted it to print at 48"x36", so I upsized it with Genuine Fractals. Just today I was told about the 33' poster.

 

Right now I am having too many problems with the file itself.

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It was originally rendered out at 4000x1333 a long time ago. Yesterday I wasl told that they wanted it to print at 48"x36", so I upsized it with Genuine Fractals. Just today I was told about the 33' poster.

 

Right now I am having too many problems with the file itself.

 

I have always found that there is a fairly direct correlation in render times when increasing resolution. Meaning, if a 48"x36" image took 2 hours. Then expect a 96"x72" image to take 8 hours because it is simply 4 times as many pixels.

 

The only time I wouldn't bank on this is there is a need for disk swapping. Then things become fairly unpredictable.

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Just to keep things in perspective, I believe IMAX uses a 4k projector (i.e. 4,000 pixels wide). And the average IMAX screen is about 70ft. wide. That works out to less than 5 ppi. If it's good enough for Avatar, I'd say it's good enough for any arch. viz. rendering.

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Just to keep things in perspective, I believe IMAX uses a 4k projector (i.e. 4,000 pixels wide). And the average IMAX screen is about 70ft. wide. That works out to less than 5 ppi. If it's good enough for Avatar, I'd say it's good enough for any arch. viz. rendering.

 

Not sure about that....people will, I assume, be walking right in front of this window display. That puts them within 3ft of the graphic.

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Not sure about that....people will, I assume, be walking right in front of this window display. That puts them within 3ft of the graphic.

 

+1

 

Projected images and digital prints are far from the same thing. If you want to make a comparison based on camera you should use a dSLR and not a movie projector.

 

The current consumer dSLR probably averages between 12-15mp. Go with a very high end professional Hasslebad camera, and you are talking 60mp.

 

A 10,000 x 3,000 image is 30mp. Half of what the Hasselbad will give you.

 

Vray will not struggle with a 30mp image, it is the deadline that will stand in the way.

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Well the printer cropped out a small portion of the image when it was blow up to only 10ft and it looked like the attached sample[ATTACH=CONFIG]41357[/ATTACH]

 

Pretty poor. And that was originally from a 4,000 pixel image that I blew up in Genuine Fractals to be 48"x36" and then sent to them.

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Just to keep things in perspective, I believe IMAX uses a 4k projector (i.e. 4,000 pixels wide). And the average IMAX screen is about 70ft. wide. That works out to less than 5 ppi. If it's good enough for Avatar, I'd say it's good enough for any arch. viz. rendering.

 

Unfortunately still images are subject to far greater scrutiny than moving pictures. You can definitely get away with more in film as your brain fills in so much more detail.

 

eek, inside a window in nyc, it will probably need to be pretty damn large, also think about the fact that you probably initially set up the amount of detail in the textures/models to be viewed max 5' wide, so at some point raising the resolution of the render out of max is running up against diminishing returns, past a certain point, all you'll be gaining will be sharper edges and more visible jpg artifacting in your textures ;)

 

Get it rendering as large as your time budget will allow basically, at the least to half of the requested size, from there, resizing up and resharpening as you can isn't toooooo much of a losing proposition.

 

Interesting point! There is definitely a sweetspot, beyond which increasing the resolution in vray or photoshop essentially becomes the same thing.

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