Cobraeye - could you explain what you mean by render in tiles. I have tried various methods of doing this without much success

http://www.petes-oasis.com/tilerendering Bruno it says the following: Ok we are going to use the alpha plane mask idea here. It has some quarks so we'll take it all one step at a time: The advantages of this idea here are really excellent. 1/ First is to plan out how many pieces you want to render your image in and build the masks accordingly. Chances are you're going to be rendering to disk anyway because the render will be too big for the screen. How many pieces? Well how well does your computer run? The worse it runs the more pieces you should render. It will make the renders smaller and you loose less of the final render should something go wrong. To make the masks make a picture in the same shape and size as your final render. Like if it's square make a square image if it's going to be rectangular make it the same. You can make it 1 to 1 size but make sure you save it as a 8 bit bmp instead of 24 bit because it will take up tons less space on your computer. Full sized is probably best because then you have maximum control over creating the masked areas. Important ! Do not try to make the mask perfect ! Your rendered images will fail. It's impossible to get the mask sitting in Vue exactly perfect so plan on having the rendered areas bigger than they need be by about 10 or 20 extra rows. i.e.: Your going to render a monster picture 5000 X 5000 in 25 squares. Don't make the squares 1/5 th (1000 X 1000) of the render area because you can't get the mask sitting in Vue perfect. Make them bigger 1050 X 1050 would be a better idea so that 50 extra pixels always get rendered extra. It's very important to render more than you actually need. Render in long strips right across the entire image if you can instead of boxes because it will actually render faster that way. If you can't though because the resulting strips will be too long then render boxes instead. I did boxes here just to prove it could be done. Don't render vertical strips, it will render really slow. Use horizontal strips instead, the same direction Vue renders. This will be the way that renders the fastest because Vue will almost completely ignore the masked parts. ny, you are just going to reload a new mask on top of it. 2 Second load your winner scene and then click on the camera. Very important ! This is very important because when you make the new alpha plane you want it be sitting exactly on the camera. Then you only have to move the mask forward a bit. You don't want to have to drag or resize your alpha plane any. You don't want to have to drag the plane half way across scene because it got created somewhere else. It has to be sitting perfectly square to the camera. The easiest way to ensure that it is, is just create it at the camera spot in the first place. You just want to create it and move it slightly forward in front of the camera so it completely covers the rendered area as best as you can place it. You can't get it sitting perfect so that's why you are over rendering the spot to compensate for this. etc... I guess you could use the same technique to mask out specific areas?

The problem is if I have to render the whole scene at the same resolution it will take weeks to render! So there is no way to get rid of the sky...? Is the only way to mask out areas (eg. the sky) to create an alpha plane directly in front of the camera and an alpha mask to mask out areas I don't want to scan? ie then I could mask out most of the sky (to speed up the render?). Pete suggests you can use masks in this way in his tiling tutorial http://www.petes-oasis.com/tilerendering. I have tried this and it works - i wondered if there was a simpler way.

So far the only way I can do something like this is to select the object on the layers panel on the main screen - then go to Render/render options/render only selected objects and then render but this way although it renders only the one object it also renders the sky, which takes a lot of time

So is it possible to render a specific object at a higher resolution than the rest of the render? And the other problem is I am rendering to disk beause the resolution is too high to render to screen. Is what you describe still possible?

storm - i'm doing 360 panorama views because I like the way it gives distorted camera views. It doesn't look the same on the main camera as what renders. So I cant tell where on the screen to draw the render area - does that make sense? Only solution i have found is doing tiny test renders until I identify the area I want, and sticking bits of paper on the screen as a guide to know where to draw a high res render area.

HI thanks silver/agiel/monsoon. All very good/useful advice. I think I'm getting things under control after panicing yesterday. One question: If I am producing a scene which will be rendered using 'panorama view'. Is there a way I can see the panoramic view in the 'Main Camera View', especially so I can select areas to render? cheers john

stormchaser - when you start printing stuff on canvas - these are the best two places I have come across and I have tried A LOT. For smaller printing on canvas/paper - www.intelligence-direct.com (high quality but not too expensive) - and for large scale printing - www.chromagene.co.uk. When I was last producing big prints a year ago I checked out a lot of places in the UK (including going to visit on press) and these were the best by far.

OK maybe I have a solution. Is it plausible that I render the whole images at as high DPI as possible and then render specific areas at much higher resolution using the 'select render area' option and then cut and paste these into photoshop. Will the camera focus/focal length etc be the same?

Sorry more questions - trying to work out why my images are pixelating. 1] If I reduced the size of poser props when i brought them into Vue by x10 does this effect the quality of the render - as opposed to if I had left the figures/props at their original size and moved the camera back instead? OR is this irrelevant. I hope so!!! I don't know why I did this I assumed it would not make any difference. 2]Does the quality of the render depend, in part, upon the resolution of the textures?

Just looked at the Respower website - wow that is complicated? has anyone used it?

OK I am starting to panic a bit! I am thinking of trying to link up two computers to speed up the renders. Is this easy to do (2 macs). At the moment my computer tells me I can't use the external renederer - it tells me to reinstall Render bull, so I will have to address that first. Also anyone know about commercial renderers/ got any links for commercial renderers?

stormchaser - yes its true you can increase scale dramatically in photoshop. There are other threads on this - this is the only one i can find quickly - http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2685598. There is is various software I use - eg perfect pixel - and also one of the best methods is supposed to be using the photoshop scaling but increasing each time only by 10% until you reach the desired size (rther than in one go - I am told by experts that this is the best way to increase sizes. But the trick is to start of with as big files as possible.

Yes ... I appreciate the problems!! Last time I did prints on a similar scale I sent the printers a 400mb file which was on a a 2 metre horizontal scale - but this file was made without any previous enlagement to the imagery (the imagery was made up from high resolution scans. This time because I'm using 3D (because I like the lighting effects etc) resolution is a problem. I am getting pixelation when i try to enlarge the vue renders. So i'm trying to render as large as possible to start with and will then do a lot of post work in photoshop. I'm experimenting with tile rendering. Or does anyone have any other ideas (I'm starting to panic!) does anyone know anything about commercial rendering facilities in the UK????

Yes this is very frustrating. Just got another prop that won't import 'EvilInnocence Ribbon' from Renderosity. I've done all of the above. As well as this I haven't got the DAZ programme, I just use a lot of their figures - I find they are the ones most likely to import into VUE infinte from POser without any trouble. Is there anything else i can try? I am using a runtime titled Runtime 7 which is inside Poser 6. This is because I installed poser 7, found it too buggy, so I moved the p7 runtime back into poser 6. It seems to work fine for most things any ideas?