What settings should I use for output to a large format printer? I would like to do some prints at 2'x3' and at least 720dpi. Also If I set to render to a large document resolution, how do I set the scene view to a size I can view what I am rendering?

2inch x 720 = 1440px 3inch x 720 = 2160px Zooming in and out on your rendered image is done with the little zoom in and zoom out icons on the right of the screen. When you are in wireframe or openGL mode these will zoom the camera, but if you are in rendermode it'll just zoom the rendered bitmap.

Thanks,now I can see what I am doing. So what should the setting be for a 24"x36" printout on a 720dpi printer then? Does changing the page setup DPI effect the final output?

When I printed one of my images at 36" x 24", the resolution was only 100 dpi. A large format image like that is meant to be viewed from a distance, so 100 dpi is usually enough. Mine came out perfectly clear at that resolution. Thought you might like to know. Save you some rendering time.

Full quality for prints is 300 PPI. The DPI of the printer is unreleted, 720 Printer DPI on a printer means that the printer can resolve 720 dots per inch. It needs to be above the pixel level in order to produce sharper edges. If the printer only has 300 dpi resolution, each pixel would be a fuzzy dot and the print would look all muddy.

At that size you can get away with 200 PPI, but 300PPI isn't going to hurt if you want to be able to walk right up to it. You'll have to use render to disk to render at the size you need. 200PPI x 36 inches x 24 inches = 7200 x 4800 pixels. You only need to set this when you render, so just make sure your aspect ratio is the same 3:2, so you could use 600x400 document resolution. At 300PPI you need to render at 10800 x 7200

Message edited on: 04/17/2005 11:55

And say they want their screen size say at 800x600...? And at 48"x36".....? And at 600DPI.....?

Sounds like I will be rendering for quite some time at 200ppi! I thought that render to disk would be best, thanks for verifying that. Is there a way to render to disk in the background? So what should the dpi be set at when rendering to disk for a 300ppi print or do I leave it at the default 72dpi?

just put in 36x24 inches in render to disk and set the dpi to 200. It should automatically render at 7200x4800 with these settings :)

I'm used to setting Screen resolutions and DPI seperatly in Photoshop. How does DPI come into play in Bryce?

DPI is just a multiplier factor that bryce uses to render images for the screen. It should be ppi because we're talking about pixels, but the software developers were a little hasty. If you render at 6x4 inches at 72 DPI in the render to disk, you get something that is 6x4 inches on the web. If you render something at 6x4 inches at 300 DPI, you get 6x4 inches when you print, and the image will be mucg larger when viewed on the web.

Some figures I toss about are;

For a 20"x30" image = 6000x9000 at 254 DPI (ppi)
Some large format printers use a RIP program to work with large files for printing large images. Usually 254 DPI is adequate and may be, with some RIP software, the maximum DPI needed. This will produce a 100+ meg file size! But will print wonderfully on a poster size.

Just a though.

Message edited on: 04/18/2005 20:14

Well a 7200x4800 at 200dpi rendered to disk took about 16hrs to complete on an Athalon 64 3000 with 1 gig memory.

I'd say that would do fine for print really :)