Attached Link: http://www.dvdunlimited.biz/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/Wall-E-poster3.jpg

so.. any guesses?

WOW !!!

I don't know but they're prolly ................................ very, very large. ... ;=]

4-8K or so ... ?

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

According to a paper on the website of Pixar's European distributor, they prefer to do everything procedurally except for logos and defining "areas of influence" (I'll use a specular map as an example). I'd guess that 85% of that pic is procedural.

Also their renderer "mipmaps" textures and the renderer choose a texture resolution based on the distance from the camera. Their painted maps probably aren't larger that 4096^2.

do you have a link for that website? I'd like to read that...

renderman.escapestudios.com but you cannot access it unless you have an account and they are NOT cheap. Below is an excerpt explaining how they created the groundplane in the Pixar Short "Boundin'":

Quote - First, the groundplane problem is solved using a combination of procedural textures and hand-painted low resolution control maps. This leverages the powerful “what versus where” approach to shading - procedural textures determining what, texture maps determining where. This technique combines the unlimited resolution of procedural textures with the directability of hand-painted maps.

The beauty of this approach is that it's totally doable within Poser 5+ ..... it'd be a great service if BagginsBill wrote a book.

Excerpts explaning how food shaders were appraoched in Ratatoille:

Quote - We also often used procedural and tiling textures over custom-painted textures per model. This allowed us to create interesting and complex patterns quickly, for reuse via slim (material editing app).

On shading grapes: > Quote - Techniques, such as paint integrated with procedural shading and painted vertex varying data to control subsurface contribution, helped provide additional control in the shaders.

If your local bookstore has a copy of the Renderman Shading Language Guide, flip to page 362. Also Check out Procedural Modeling And Texturing.

That image is enlarged at least 50%, it's not so obvious on the very top of the image but I see that it's very pixelated at the edges practically everywhere.  Only the text at the bottom isn't pixelated.  Aside from that you really don't know if the whole image wasn't painted by hand from scratch, beware of promo art and trying to think of it in pure technical render terms.

I must be misreading 'Aside from that you really don't know if the whole image wasn't painted by hand from scratch, beware of promo art and trying to think of it in pure technical render terms.' cos that really sounds like 'Don't try to get that kind of quality'

could you clarify?

Keep in mind that promo art is generally rendered at higher resolution than "moving images", which we'll never really see perfectly due to motion blur. I hadn't noticed the pixellation before, but yeah, it's prominent. I doubt that it was painted by hand. Why would you send it to an art department and go through the trouble when you already have the asset and could send it to a render farm instead? Just a personal opinion.

The textures could easily be procedural. Perhaps bitmaps were used to place the texture areas.

That poster took forever to load on 56k and didn't even display in my browser. I had to open it in PhotoShop to see it.l 

Quote - I must be misreading 'Aside from that you really don't know if the whole image wasn't painted by hand from scratch, beware of promo art and trying to think of it in pure technical render terms.' cos that really sounds like 'Don't try to get that kind of quality'

could you clarify?

I'm saying, "you have no idea if that image was rendered at all, it may have been painted by hand from scratch".  Thought it was pretty clear.

no, thats not how it came across here... thats why I asked you to clarify.

 Try the demo:

http://pixar.escapestudios.com/demo/bin/view