Render resolution for large prints

[liorsturlesi]

Hi

I'm trying to figure what resolution should I render the image if the client wants to print the image on 300/400 cm wall. It will be hung on his back office wall so It Would be pretty close to watch.

If I print it to be 300 dpi 3ds max wizard indicate enormous 24,000 pixel render wide.

I guess I should go down with the dpi...

What should you recommend in these sizes ?

 

Thank you in advance

Lior.

[Chris MacDonald]

http://isthisretina.com/

[dannyprice]

Well like most things in the world of cg it's one of those things were there's no definitive number.

Main factors are:

How far will it realistically be viewed (not many people are going to get really close to a 3x4m image)

^Though this can be untrue if the next factor comes to play which is the level of detail. If the image contains a lot of texture or distance detail then you'll want a larger output file

What medium is it going to be printed on

 

What you could do is render an area out at different resolutions, then set them out on a document to resemble the scale they'll be, then print that on A4/3 and see the quality.

 

Photoshop and an online print size calculator both say it should be 35433 x 47244px for a 300dpi print

[Scott Schroeder]

Stop all of the guess work and just ask the print shop where this will be printed. They'll tell you what type of printer they will be using and what settings it has and give you size recommendations. For something this big, it is typically around 150dpi or lower.

 

Everyone is taking a 1 minute phone call and turning it into something as complicated as landing on the moon.

[RyderSK]

You can forgo the DPI=PPI relation. It does not matter at all how many dots of color will be used to print single pixel of information. There is NO relationship at all.

In real world usage, these terms are conflated, and used in same way but it really doesn't dictate such simplified, overkill formula.

 

Even in magine use, the DPI is best used for vector graphics (which includes text) and almost never for photography. 100 Mpx medium-format photography is still only 11 600px in width, what would they do if they wanted larger print than it gives ? up-scale it ? And that is with camera AA, which is like 2px gaussian blur with the most quality lens compared to what we get from CGI.

 

400 cm wide print would be well-detailed even if you used 72 PPI. (it would equal exactly 100 Mpx in this case ). Anything after that is just nice overkill bonus. So if you want to render more, it's fine but there will be no visible difference, no one will watch it from 5 cm, CGI detail at that resolution is simply ugly and inkjet plotter will blurry this detail, so effectively it won't even be visible anyway.

[matejovsenek]

10 times smaller, for a 4m x 3m billboard a 40cm x 30cm render @ 100dpi will translate to 4x3 at 10dpi which is what billboards are printed at... since this is in your clients office on a wall, just ask the print shop how high in the dpi department they can go, and maybe render split images, because youll be having problems working on extremely large images. for example 24.000px wide render would translate to 3.5GB rgba tiff image and photoshop only supports 4gb tiffs or 2gb psd files, so that's a no go.

 

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[Casey Hawley]

You can forgo the DPI=PPI relation. It does not matter at all how many dots of color will be used to print single pixel of information. There is NO relationship at all.

In real world usage, these terms are conflated, and used in same way but it really doesn't dictate such simplified, overkill formula.

 

Even in magine use, the DPI is best used for vector graphics (which includes text) and almost never for photography. 100 Mpx medium-format photography is still only 11 600px in width, what would they do if they wanted larger print than it gives ? up-scale it ? And that is with camera AA, which is like 2px gaussian blur with the most quality lens compared to what we get from CGI.

 

400 cm wide print would be well-detailed even if you used 72 PPI. (it would equal exactly 100 Mpx in this case ). Anything after that is just nice overkill bonus. So if you want to render more, it's fine but there will be no visible difference, no one will watch it from 5 cm, CGI detail at that resolution is simply ugly and inkjet plotter will blurry this detail, so effectively it won't even be visible anyway.

 

This post is all over the place with bad info, so I will clarify.

 

DPI and PPI isn't the number of dots used to print 1 pixel, it's the number of dots used to print 1 square-inch of the image. DPI is directly related to the viewing distance. Yes, a picture on a wall can be viewed at a range of distances. So use the average viewing distance.

 

Mpx has nothing to do with printing and everything to do with digital camera specs. Printers are sold with DPI specs, not Mpx. The DPI resolution setting in many 3D programs is for the explicit purpose of producing necessary visual fidelity for desired print size and view distance. Output from 3D programs is never in vector format.

 

Any graphics professional should agree that vector graphics are known to be resolution independent.