Last week I received my copy of Vue 5 and I just finished my first picture which I'm having printed to canvass for a christmas present, for my Brother, through www.zazzle.com

I first rendered the picture on Final settings and it took about 30 minutes and turned out beautifully. I then rendered it on Ultra settings and it took 9 hours to render. The two images look exactly the same to me, in fact, I cannot see any difference whatsoever between them.

They were both rendered at 1600 x 1200. For anyone who doesn't know, Vue 5's render settings are as follows: Sketch, Preview, Final, Broadcast, Superior, Ultra, and User Settings. What gives?

Do the render settings in this case have to do with print quality? How can I find out, besides spending a lot of money trying different versions on print products?

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

P.S. Vue 5 has been a pleasure to work with so far. There have been some issues with file saving and selection, but I have worked my way around that. Also, don't install it onto a drive that already has Vue 4 on it, because with me, it saved all my new scenes, materials, and objects into my Vue 4 folders. My suggestion would be to either install it on a different drive, or backup all your Vue 4 stuff and remove it from your drive before installing Vue 5.

Ultra should clean-up a Final quality's graininess. The graininess from a lower quality anti-aliasing occurs foremost in the blur, soft shadows, and volume material production.

Thanks for the sharing the link.

Message edited on: 11/08/2004 10:44

So what your saying is I should use high settings when printing the picture to any kind of medium (i.e. canvass, t-shirts, tile, high gloss paper, etc)? Another quick question: I view all my final renders on my 20 inch Cinema Display running on an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 64MB.....does the quality I view it at have anything to do with how others see it......In other words, If I upload a render I did on Final settings, and it looks great on my setup, can I assume it will still look great on an old 17 inch running on a Rage128? Graininess is my main concern. Obviously color would be different.

For which quality is best or adequate for printing, I don't know. I never made any prints. Maybe somebody else can help?

I did a poster once through zazzle, 35x35 I loved how it turned out. No grain I can see... Only use final 300dpi and it was vue 4. Might depend on what it is. If you have a lot of glass, reflections etc the grain would really be visiable.

Thanks for the help you two. I didn't think about the shadowing, reflections and glass....I suppose I'll end up just using high settings, but with the sizes (i.e. 5200 x 3500) it will take days to render it. Not looking forward to that. Thanks though, for all the help.

Printers who know what they are doing use Photoshop- and you can re-size and "massage" a render up to higher resolutions that look extremely good. I use Final for a lot of stuff because I have my own "art" technique I use to make it look like art- not your standard Photoshop filters. However- if you are looking for a more hi-rez photo look then you should render at around 3200 x 2400 (or that approximation) and that will take around 5-6 hours (done overnight)- depending upon your machine. The higher Vue render settings are most apparent on things like sharp details, chrome, etc and if you think it is a real "classic"- or has commercial value as a larger photorealistic poster then render at Broadcast mode. It really all depends on what the "look" is intended for, and if it is for family use- or commercial sales...