Hi
I am doing some work for publication (magazine) but my poser renders get jagged and not as crisp as I want to. What resolution would you recommend? 3000x3000 pixels? 300dpi? I would be very grateful for any feedback as I had some renders rejected due to jaggedness.

Thanks for any advice
Pete

300dpi will be good enough for a good quality print with no jaggedness. The magazine should be able to provide you with their submission standards, though.

To determine the pixel dimensions required for your submission you need to know at what size it will be printed (in inches) and then multiply that by 300. So, for example, if it will be printed 3 inches wide, then your horizontal dimension needs to be 900 pixels. 3000x3000 would allow for prints up to 10 inches in both axes.

Thanks Snarlygribbly

The multiply by 300 advice was new to me. So I'll stick to 300dpi and use this formula.

Really appreciate the help
Thanks alot

Pete

There's also this Wiki entry. 

Thanks cspear!!

Great link!!! This helps alot!

Really good help!!

//Per

I write/illustrate for a magazine; the full-page illustrations are 3000 pixels high, including my first front cover (Advanced Photoshop (Dutch)). I've never had to worry about DPI, just used the standard setting, which is probably heresy, but my Art Editor seems happy.

Hi Paul

Thanks alot for that advice. I know it comes from a true professional. I have seen your articles in 3D Artist and your column is one of the highlights of the magazine. I did not realize what was possible with Poser until I saw your illustrations. They really should give you more space in 3D Artist.
I have upgraded to Poser Pro 2010 and I am now struggling to master light settings in Poser.

Thanks alot for your advice
Pete

 PegLegPete (I know nothing about lighting however...) - there's  a really cool lighting thing you can do in poser pro 2010.
delete all lights.  put in one point light and position it above your character.  go to properties and bottom right change to inverse square.
then render with IDL turned on.
if u have trouble manipulating your light, try increasing the scale until u can see it easily.  (this doesn't change the lighting)
Love esther
ps if you use gamma 2.2 then use a python script to turn it off for transmaps and bumps back to one.  if the skin looks  too grey and u want it pinker, turn off gamma in render settings (uncheck box) and set tone mapping to HSv 2.2

It may not be a resolution problem, but anti-aliasing.
Set your pixel samples to 7, use filter of sinc with filter of 2

Hi esther and Medzinatar

Thanks for the advice. The lightning set up sounds cool. I will try that today and come back and tell you the result. Also the pixel samples settings looks like something I really need to investigate.

So far I have tried to gt rid of jaggedness in Phostoshop by adding Gaussian blur but that instead makes the whole image look out of focus.
With the advice from this forum I have a couple of new options. It will be a late night :-)

Pete

 set your min shading rate very low like 0.2 for clearer looking detail as well.

 I render quite big eg 300 DPI and over 1000 pixels.
Trick in photoshop that if it's that big, to fit it into your window - photoshop shows it at say 66% and if you look at 100% suddenly all the jaggies are gone, and it's just some sort of display artifact.

Folks, please ignore "DPI" and concentrate on the pixel count. The pixel count determines the amount of information in the image, and if there's insufficient information in the image, you'll get things like jaggies.

And it's PPI - Pixels Per inch. Setting it to 300, or anything else for that matter, is not some magic switch that makes everything OK. 

I typically render at around 3600 x 2400 pixels: that's 12in x 8in at 300 ppi - not particularly huge in print terms.

Quote - Folks, please ignore "DPI" and concentrate on the pixel count. The pixel count determines the amount of information in the image, and if there's insufficient information in the image, you'll get things like jaggies.

True, but in order to know what pixel count you need you have to multiply the intended print dimension by the requisite DPI, so you can't just ignore it.

Quote - And it's PPI - Pixels Per inch. Setting it to 300, or anything else for that matter, is not some magic switch that makes everything OK.

Well, you're right of course, but that's just pedantry. Poser calls it DPI and whether it's right to do so or not isn't important - introducing other acronyms just confuses the matter for non-technical people.

Quote - I typically render at around 3600 x 2400 pixels: that's 12in x 8in at 300 ppi - not particularly huge in print terms.

But a render of that size would be unnecessarily time consuming if you were only going to print it at 3"x2", which is why DPI matters - it can be used to determine that you only need a 900x600 pixel image for your intended use. I think what you meant was that it doesn't matter what you set it to in Poser's render dimensions dialog box, which in a sense is true - but that is different from saying ignore it altogether.

Quote - True, but in order to know what pixel count you need you have to multiply the intended print dimension by the requisite DPI, so you can't just ignore it.

Indeed - the point is that setting 300 PPI by itself won't achieve anything.

Quote - Poser calls it DPI

Poser calls it Pix/In, not Dots/In ! Because when you render, you produce pixels, not dots!

  > Quote - and whether it's right to do so or not isn't important - introducing other acronyms just confuses the matter for non-technical people.

I know that people use DPI when they mean PPI. Even professionals. Even whichever genius decided to use the term in Vue's render settings dialogue.

But professionals know that if they have a 1200 DPI printer, they don't feed it 1200 PPI images: they know that the printer uses 4 dots to reproduce each pixel, so they know anything higher than 300 PPI is overkill. And they can figure out when 300 dots per inch means exactly that, and when it really means 300 pixels per inch.

 The point of my post was to get people to stop assuming that "300 DPI" is a magic switch that makes everything 'professional' - because that is what a lot people do - and to start considering how many pixels they need to produce.

Dots and pixels. They're different things. It's not pedantry.

If using PPI makes people think, "oh, I need this many pixels! Per Inch!" they won't get confused about render resolution issues.

I'll repeat my oft-used mantra:
"Only printers have dots - everything else has pixels". 

Quote - [But professionals know that if they have a 1200 DPI printer, they don't feed it 1200 PPI images: they know that the printer uses 4 dots to reproduce each pixel, so they know anything higher than 300 PPI is overkill.

Probably the printer will use even more than 4 dots. A square of 4x4 dots of black ink on white paper gives you only 16 shades of gray.

Cool. I'm sure all this has clarified things for the OP who was probably struggling with the simplicity of my original reply. I keep forgetting that hobbyist Poser users are often professional printers too and need to know these things.

Hi
I started this thread and I must say that I have been given alot of really good advice. And on a more professional level than I had expected. I have been trying out new renders using this newfound knowledge and I see great improvements. A small drawback is that FireFly cant really cope with the much larger formats that Iam now rendering in. For example, 3000 x 3000 pixels and raytrcing always stops halfthrough even with a bucket size of 1. Anyway I'll figure it out. (Probbly hae to render smll parts of the image at a time).

Thanks alot for all the feedback. It seems that Poser is moving out from being a hobbysoftware to the more professional market.

Best regards
Pete

 try that very large render in render to queue.  I've never found the queue to fail
Love esther

Pete, the bucket size is the number of pixels each thread of the processor works on at one time. You should adjust the bucket size to something more realistic: a bucket size of 1 is useless, the smallest I use regularly is 16 (i.e. 16 x 16 pixels) and anything larger than 128 makes little sense.

Choose 32 as a start point.  I've rendered complex scenes at well over 6000px in Poser 8 with no trouble, though it does take a while. 

What are your system specs? (Just CPU, RAM and OS).

Which software version?

What render settings (a screenshot is best)?

I'll try 32, but I have had some problems. Maybe my system is not good enough?
I have a Dell Precision M6400 laptop and I run PoserPro 2010 on it.
Intel Core DUO CPU
T9400@2.53GHZ
1.59GHZ
, 3.48GB RAM
Windows XP Professional

These are my render settings.
Any suggestions is more than welcome

Thanks
Pete

I use remove backfacing polygons in large scenes.

Also, use the D3D render script that comes with Poser for more control (it's in the Scripts menu under Partners > Dimensions3D > Render Firefly). Here are screenshots of my general-purpose settings as they load in Poser's standard dialogue and in the D3D dialog.

How many threads are set in your preferences? Two would be right for that chip. And your laptop is a bit underpowered for doing large renders.... but if that's what you have, it's going to be a long wait.

Many thanks cspear
I will try this out on a large render and let you know the results.
As my laptop is underpowered what would you recommend? I will buy a new stationary PC this fall and any advice on what to look for with the aim of doing large poser renders (and later Maya) would be great.

Thanks for this input
Pete

Hi
I did a 3000x3000 render and it looks really good. I hadnt used the indirect lightning before but now I am really going to do some experimenting. Also I did some tweaking on the raytraced blur radius and shadow samples to soften the raytraced shadows of the key light with really good result. There is alot to learn but my render has really improved in the last couple of days.

Thanks again
Great advice
Pete

Quote -  what would you recommend?

Hard to say without knowing your budget. If you're buying off-the-shelf you'll find that the 'powerful' desktops are targeted at gaming nerds. They tend to want fabulous graphics cards - you need something decent, but you should sacrifice some graphics performance to get the best CPU you can afford.

Prioritise your spending thus:

1. CPU (Intel Core i7 if funds allow)
2. RAM (the more the merrier, but stick to the basic stuff)
3. Graphics card (won't affect rendering, but will affect responsiveness when dealing with complex Poser scenes)
4. everything else

Doing a self-build is the way to get the most bangs for your buck, but only if you know what you're doing - you can make some very expensive mistakes. Also look for 'barebones' systems: typically the motherboard + CPU + RAM installed, all you have to do is put it in a case, add hard disks and graphics card and install the OS.

Many sites (e.g. Dell) let you configure your own PC to some extent, and there's probably a local store that will build one to your specs.

Thanks cspear

Good advice! I will follow your recommendations and see how much bang for the bucks that I can get.

//Pete

And of course don't forget to get a 64 bit version of Windows (nowadays Windows 7 is recommended).

A good CPU, lots of memory and a 64 bit OS make your machine fly. I when I say lots of memory I do mean LOTS of memory when you make renders this big. Always check that your machine is actually using all the memory you put in, several motherboards have problems in this regards.

 PegLegPete did you try changing a pointlight in the properties part of the parameters window (bottom right) to inverse square when you tried your IDL render?  You should.  it will look really good,
Love esther

Hi esther
I did, and you are right. It really does look cool. I have been experimenting alot with lights the past 2 days and there seem to be so many ways of setting up a scene. Besides the thumb rules from 3-point lighting there seem to be no rules except for what looks good. At the moment I am trying to be minimalistic, that is I am using as few lights as possible but still trying to achieve the right result and mood. I guess you need to keep on learning for ever when you want to create good images.
Thanks for this advice. I would not have found this without you telling me.

Best regards
Pete

I notice from your earlier screenshot of your render settings that you're using PoserPro 2010, but with Gamma Correction disabled.

Enabling GC will enhance the realism - you may need to do some work with your shaders in the material room, but the results are worth it.

In the illustration, the five objects are equally spaced. There are two spots, one to the left, one to the right, each with Inverse Square falloff, 100% brightness, shadows at 100%, pure white. The distance of the left spot from the leftmost object = distance from the central object to the leftmost object, pointing down at 45 degrees, this is mirrored on the right.

The top render was made in Poser 8 (so no GC), the bottom render is exactly the same scene rendered in PP2010, same render settings except that GC is enabled at 2.2.

Hi cspear

You were right (again). I did a render with Gamma Correction and it looked good. The light became softer and more realistic. I have read that Gamma Correction is not necessary in the new versions of Poser and also that it causes more problems than its worth. However my render was without problems and I think it was improved. I got more or less the same results (better and softer light) that you show in your examples above. I will certainly keep using it.

Thanks for pushing for this

Pete

Quote - Those settings look a little aggressive: unless you're rendering a shiny object in front of a mirror, you don't need 4 raytrace bounces. 1 ...   ...but if that's what you have, it's going to be a long wait.

Hi,

I've just tried to change my settings to your general settings, but I didn't have a HDRI option and in the D3D settings box, it wouldn't let me select 'raytracing' into green. Also , I couldn't see what your DPI settings were on the pic.
(I use Poser 8)

The HDRI option is PP2010 only.

I've no idea what makes the text change colour in the D3D script, but it doesn't affect anything. If raytracing is enabled, it's enabled.

My DPI settings are irrelevant. They are whatever they need to be. 

OK, thanks for that.

-EDIT-

Oh no - I tried rendering and all I get now is a black screen!
What have I done?
I've even tried 'restore defaults' on Render settings, but it's still black
Arrgh! help!

Its OK - my mad clicking seems to have sorted it out now. I'll be careful in future, mother!