Hey guys. Got a question. I am going to make a poster of one of my Vue renders. It says I need to render to disk which I am. I put in the res size as 5250 pixels x 3500 pixels and set anti aliasing to full. I have pretty reflective water and a glowing moon in the image. It says its going to finish in 113 hours. This is my first time rendering something that large. Should it really take days to render? Should it speed up a lot? I know its hard to say since you guys can see the image, but just give me your thoughts please. Thanks.

oh yeah. It might help to tell you my cpu stats. Sorry. I am rendering it on my dell inpiron 8200 laptop. Its a 1.6 GHZ with 256 DDR ram. If you need anymore help let me know. I could always compress it and send it to you if you wanna see it and get a better judgment. Thanks for the help.

That doesn't surprise me...are you rendering at 300dpi? If not, you should, if you're going to print it and want a decent quality print. If you have reflective and glowing materials, that adds substantially to render time, as I found out when doing one of our contests a few months back. In your world browser, on the right of the screen, where it has the layers and all the objects in your scene, have you grouped similar items as much as possible, or items close together, and then made the layers invisible? I find grouping helps my render time slightly. I"ve also found that while initially a render might say XX hours, as it renders, that time estimate can change, either way.

I am doing 100 DPI. Zazzle.com said that is what they used so I just thought there was no point to going higher. Am I wrong? Should I render 320 DPI? Or does it not matter since they use 100 DPI? Thanks for the input.

113 hours of rendering time for such a big one doesn't surprise me very much. Regarding your dpi "problem". In fact it doesn't matter really what you select there. Important is the amount of pixels. dpi only tells you how many pixels you will have on one inch. Nothing more. You need to have these pixels which you can spread out. You must look at it from the other side. If you want to have a specific size of your image, with a specific amount of pixels per inch (100 dpi or 300 dpi for example) you can calculate how many pixels you need to render. It is obvious that the more pixels you have per inch, the better the quality of the printed image will be. But as i said, the amount of pixels is important. You can change the value for dpi in most of the paint programs (like Photoshop). So don't worry about that.

Thanks for the help guys. I appreciate it.

Do not worry about long renders, go for the quality if you gonna make a poster. High rendering and good resolution give you a result that's satisfy you. I have a 2,4 Ghz, 1 Gb ram and optical bus. Still I can render for days. Good luck!!

what i forgot regarding long renders. I had one render which run for ages. To be sure that nothing can happen through a missoperation (by the cleaning woman for example) i disconnected the mouse and the keyboard. And of course, go for quality! Good luck from me too!

By my experiences, very important are materials. I had one scene with mirror walls and a lot of high reflective materials. I tried ultra settings and estimated time was 6 days for 1024768 render !!! Also, if you have volumetric atmosphere, a lot of lights, glass materials etc., everything dramatically increases render time. BTW, last week I made my biggest render (Still life image from my gallery) 124009400 pixels at 300 DPI :) It took 16 hours in final mode on Athlon 1800XP and 256 MB RAM.

proper grouping will shave hours off. Group in blocks in the way vue renders. Top left, top middle, top right, middle left, middle center, middle right, Bottom left, bottom center, bottom right, If you got room you could even make more groups than these 9. The idea is to split the scene up into cubes and everything that falls into those cube areas gets grouped together. It's called offically: Bounding box hierarchy. page 106 of the book If you render lots of huge sizes all the time you may want to look at my tutorial here on Tile rendering. It could save you tons of greef.

Would Rendercow help with a single image render like this?

no, it only distributes different images of an animation

I left it overnight and is says its 10% done with 113 hours to go. This one is going to be long. Thanks for your help guys. I appreciate it.

I find when it gets to about 50% it's about 75% done. But if you have glow it will make two more pretty fast passes after the 113 hous so don't be surprized whan it happens. Also the clock will not update and that time making it appear that vue is locked up. Just ignore it it's running just fine. If you get a blue screen then you got problems.

DPI will make no difference to your render time; it does not matter if it is set at 100 DPI or 1000. Apart from scene complexity and materials, the only other things that will effect render time are image size and render quality....oh and CPU speed (amongst a load of other minor things) if you considering hardware as well. Cheers