Attached Link: http://www.mythospheres.com/grey.html

Okay, I need to render a scene for a 28x21 inch poster. I tried 300 pixels per inch with the FireFly renderer, but after 8 hours or so my system appeared to grind to a complete halt, i.e., there was no visible evidence on the progress bar for the last 3 hours that any progress was being made. (I have a P4 2400mgz w/ 1 GIG DDR.) So ... I'm wondering, what is the top rendering image size I should be able to expect?, and should I drop down to 200 pixels per inch, i.e., 5600x4200? Will that *really* be sufficient for a hi-quality poster? I've always been under the impression 200 per is a little low for this sort of thing. And/or, what would the advantages and disadvantages be of moving everything to Vue and rendering it there? (This scene does not use any of Poser 5's advanced features like dynamic hair and stuff, so hopefully the scene would port over to Vue rather easily.) I've never done this Poser to Vue thing before but am under the impression, from posts I've read here at Renderosity, that Vue has the better renderer. Is it also (I hope) faster? Thanks for any advice and/or explanations in advance.

The basic rule for printing is twice the line screen. Newspapers work at 85 line screen, magazines are at 133. Of course all of this depends on what the printer is set up for. If you have a printer in mind you can call them up and ask them what line screen and work from that information. Hope that helps somewhat.

Drifting down an OT rabbit-trail, but curious:

Rendering at 8400x6300 pixels? -- How you doin' that?

P4 caps-out at 4096, (unless rendered as an animation).

Assuming your problem lies elsewhere, does P5 normally permit such large dimensions to be rendered directly as stills?

And here's my dumb question for Ghost.....what is 'line screen'?

A term that printers use (guys that print, not a laser printer) for how many lines can be in an inch .. Line screen is also called lines per inch or lpi ... I am not the greatest historian on it but I think it comes from the screen printing industry which actually had different wire or cloth meshes with different screen density ... Different screens work better on different surfaces etc .. If you use a high line screen on newsprint it ends up blobbing since there is too fine an ink spray ind it soaks in ... T-shirts are done at even lower density etc ..

Attached Link: http://www.mythospheres.com/grey.html

Nance, P5 with the Firefly renderer does not seem to limit me to 4096; it accepted 8400 without a qualm; however, as you probably guessed by my post, my PC did not like it much. Ghostofmacbeth, as for 'line screen,' somewhere I got the impression that art prints averaged something like 150 to 160 lpi. If that's right, using your rule of thumb, I guess I wasn't far off. Thanks for the feedback. Does anybody have any feedback on Vue?

Generally bitmapped images on posters don't require a huge dpi as posters are seen/read from a certain distance, as opposed to a book for instance. So 200dpi will be just fine I'm sure. Or perhaps 240. Any text on the poster on the other hand needs to be vector and sharp. But that of course is handled by the layout app. As Ghost says, it depends very much on what your printer is set up for. A couple of other things: 1. If P5 freezes, use a smaller bucket size, it is more likey to render then, less taxing on P5's memory handling routines. 2. When working with large images, you may get sharper and better results with anti alias switched off. The resolution of the image will be sufficient so you won't get jaggies. The positive side effect is a sharper image. :] Fish

Thanks for the comments Fishnose.