Going through the galleries, I've noticed people have really big pictures. i was wondering do most of you guys render your pictures that big or do you render your pictures small (like around 500 X 500) and then scale them larger in postwork.

Nope. The other way round for me. I render as big as possible then scale 'em down. I suspect most people do that, too. Otherwise the images would be pixellated when they were enlarged.

Follow up question...do you have to render to the same aspect ratio as your view when you're working in Poser? If not, how can you tell exactly what portion of the view you'll be rendering?

Actually, Photoshop can scale up fairly smoothly. I had to do that for an image that I needed to scale up by about 2.5x when printing it. Even on screen with magnification, the scaled version did not appear pixellated. But yeah, I generally render at final resolution or larger. As a test, I once did a simple scene (a marble sphere on reflecting ground) at 9000 by 9000 pixels, just to see if the P5 render would handle it. (That's the resolution required for a 30x30 print at 300dpi.) It took all night, but it worked.

I always use the same aspect ratio in preview as in my render. My default preview window is 1200 x 900 and I usually render at 2400 x 1800 or above.

The only time I don't use the same aspect ratio is when I'm generating tall thumbnail images for the library. I have a library pose and camera setup which I adjusted by making the preview the same aspect ratio as the thumbnail I wanted. Now, when I want to render a tall thumbnail, I set the pose and the camera I've saved in the library, then make the render output to the thumbnail aspect ratio and render. I don't need to check the preview with this kind of preset, but in any other circumstance I can imagine, you would want to. In contrast, DAZ Studio has a render output box in their preview window, so you know what will be in scene and what will get cropped out of the render.

Oh and for comparison, I usually have my preview window at 960x960 for square or standard 91x91 thumbnails and 240x960 for 91x364 tall thumbnail renders. I also use 1280x960 previews when I'm making wallpaper images. My normal picture renders are usually 1600x1600 to fit my monitor width without scaling.

Someone will surely correct me if I'm wrong, but I am quite sure that even if you do not render to the same aspect ratio, it will render the whole scene anyway.

Everything you see in the preview will be part of the final render. If the render output dimensions are taller or wider than the preview aspect ratio, additional parts of the whole scene are rendered to fill the extra dimension. There are occasional exceptions to that if extremely short, fish-eye type focal lengths are used, i.e. 13mm or smaller. Jagged borders of background appear round the edges of the render, almost as though the camera is trying to look behind the focal plane and the rendering engine gives up.

gwhicks: Wierd, that image gave me a moment of vertigo.