Hi, As some of you know from my previous posts lately I am trying to do some renders at 75000x50000 or larger. The render times on one scene will be a couple of weeks and thats on an easier scene than my other ones I will need to render. So I have a question. I am using V6I. I dont have any other programs or xstream right now so I was wondering from those that do will I get better render times in something like C4D or lightwave? Do I need xstream to load the entire vue scene into one of those apps? I know there are still some tricks I can try to render that large in V6I that I have to try yet but I was wondering if its worth investing in another 3D app for rendering if there is an improvement in speed. Sorry if this has been gone over before. I tried searching but its late and my brain is tired!

If you can absorb the cost, you might want to consider using a commercial renderfarm.

Has anyone tried rendering several different angles of a large scene with a narrower focal length and then stitching the photos together with a camera stitching program?

@ ImagineThat: using xStream won't render faster, since Vue will render the Vue elements, and the host app will render the rest.
@synergy543: No, haven't tried this yet.

thfixer: yeah I wish I could try a renderfarm but I cant afford to yet until I generate some income off of some of these early renders. bruno021: thanks for the info, was curious about that. Ok here's one for you guys. Keep in mind I am dead tired and this probably wont make any sense. What if I have an image I want to render at the above mentioned 7500 x 5000 size and its going to take weeks to render. What about rendering small chunks of it at a time with something like the selective area render option and saving all of those smaller renders then piecing them together in something like Photoshop? Would my accumulative render time of all of those small renders equal up to the same as just doing the full size render? I hate to whine about render times but I am in a time crunch. Normally if it would take weeks I would let it go and render but I cant do that this time.

I would say it would take longer this way. Area renders seem to take a lot of time preparing for the render before actually rendering, a lot more than full size renders. Plus all the time needed to adjust everything in Photoshop.
Now about the renderfarm, it may not be as expensive as you think.
Check this link:
ranchcomputing.com

I wonder if you could use a mask in front of the camera to block out selective areas to render so you don't need to do overlaps (as you would with stitching)? The thing to do would be to test it with a smaller image first unless possibly someone has already tried this. I vaguely recall someone mentioning this idea before... not sure where though.

Yeah, I remember it too, but vaguely. maybe it was at CGTalk?

I tried a 10000 by 16000 with Esprit, and each selectively small rendered section came out with a slightly different color and contrast?  Stitching or overlapping was of little help.  I am good with photoshop but finally gave up after a couple of attempts.

Maybe use the 1 hour deal at The Ranch renderfarm and see how much gets completed in that time, might give you a good idea of how long the full render would take and you could calculate costs accordingly

Jon

There is another possibility; you could use a smaller image and then resize with a software program to the intended size.  

You might look into Genuine Fractals 5.0 a plug-in for Photoshop.  It works best with CS3, but is backware compatible with several older versions.  It has the capability to resize 1000%.  Imagener has another program that can resize to mural proportions.  Although good, I have both programs, and think that GF is far better.

That might be a good idea keenart on using a resampling plug in. Do you know how Genuine Fractals compares to Alien Skin Blow-up?

keenart - When using Genuine Fractals 5.0 how much quality is lost when resizing a large amount? There must be some slight degredation?

Blowup is probably the best resize app, primarily because of the additional effects, and Genuine Fractals perhaps second. However, I find that due to the requirements and the algorithms used it really depends more on what you are trying to resize and how large you want to resize the image. Remember, CS typically has a max of 32,000 x 32,000 ppi for some versions.

Some resize CS plug-ins, can resize as a stand alone, and also in conjunction with CS, some do not.  How that works for GF, is you resize the image and apply any modifications and effects to the image using CS. Say you want to resize an image to 200% using CS. You then use the plug-in to resize the image another 200 to 500%, using a fractal algorithm.  This is how you get the up to 1000% increase in resize over the original. 

I have to recommend that the best ppi for image resize is approximately 300 to 400 ppi.   

There are several stand alone resize apps that will do large images, as large as your computer can handle, but I have tried them, and do not feel they are the quality of GF.

Another point I would like to add. If you are a good photographer and have used Photoshop for many years, you are usually able to add many additional personal refinements to any finished image without using these plug-ins, but these plug-ins could save time.

There is always some degradation for any resize, in the form of pixilation, tessellation, or blurred anti-aliasing. In most cases it is minimal enough the human eye does not notice, sometimes a number 4 loop is required to see the difference. However, that is the reason for rendering an image in high resolution 300 to 600 ppi, so that you could resize to lower resolutions or larger sizes with no or minimal loss. 

I took a 99 x 94 x 133 ppi sample of China Straits, a compressed JPG from my gallery. The original compression was about 80 % progressive. 

In Photoshop CS2, a 200% Bicubic Smoother resize was applied to the sample cut. This resized image was further resize to 400% for a total of 800% over the original image. 

The two images side by side are a comparison, one to the left is 94 x 99 x 133 ppi, and the image to the right is 752 x 792 x 133 dpi.  

You could also make a comparison of the original, in the reverse order, to see how the pixels were resized and anti-aliased, but I believe this image comparison speaks for itself.

stormchaser; An additional note about the quality of a resized image. 

I talked to a tech about this question, and he explained that each resize application has a maximum percent of resize in relation to the best quality for a resized image. 

For instance, if an application says you will receive the best quality resized to but not above 200%, should you resize above the recommended percent of increase degradation begins to occur. 

So this would indicate that you would want to calculate the size of Rendered image in relation to the final size of the enlarged image to keep the quality at its maximum.

Thanks for all of the info keenart, a lot to think about and test!

Glad to help. Yes, it is a little mind-bending. 

You could always download the trialware. Might just save you some valuable time.