I am currently working on an image which will eventually be outputted at large scale (5 x 9 metres) for an art exhibition. I have attached the current early working version. OK nothing special as yet! The figures/flower which are imported from Poser need a lot more work but give an idea of the kind of composition I am going for.

The scene has 52 objects, 1 light and 1,235,376 polygons and the atmosphere is a spectral model.

My problem, as ever, is with render times - as I am hoping to render the image at a relatively large size ( 600 x 280cm at 72dpi) so the final image has enough detail. I have read the various tutorials and forums (Peggy, Rutra and others) and will be following their advice in setting up the various render options. In the past I have also rendered in slices. What I am wondering is whether, considering the background figures will be small and silhouetted, is there anything I can do in Poser (before I import them) to reduce their size/comlexity (eg polygons or textures)? Or does anyone have any other ideas?

Any advice/suggestions appreciated.

Well, one idea is to use a render farm so that you do not have to block your system for just rendering.

Another idea is to render the Poser stuff separately, save that with transparent background and then use those as 2D alpha planes. Speeds up render times a lot.

See my tuorial, link in signature on how to reduce Poser figure resource useage :)

and...to be honest, you are wanting too much, less you have a 8+ gig RAM system, I doubt it will work? Such a huge render = huge resource needs.

Best to render as large as is practical, then use an app liek GENUINEFRACTALS (photoshop plugin) to enlarge it up from that! :)

if your figures are silhouetted, and not showing skin details, why not set their skin to flat black or a flat skin shade, maybe with a slight noise for a bump?  it'll reduce memory load with texture maps...

but a render farm sounds the way to go or the ideas silver & wabe had...

That's quite a project you've got there.
Maybe check with the printing company first what resolution they need for a proper print.
The maximum resolution I could squeeze out of Vue once (infinite 6.5) was about 12.000 x 8000. And that was a very simple scene. Maybe Vue7 handles it better, don't know. If I calculate it right you are going for 17.000 by 8000 pixels. That's a lot!

If you decide to render it yourself, do a test render first with an empty spectral scene at that resolution. It might turn out that the memory load is to heavy for your system. As a result Vue will not be able to compile the picture in the end and you will loose the whole render. Not something you want to find out after four days of rendering, as I did!!

I like Wabe's idea. That will reduce the system load a lot.

Cheers!

And remember that texture maps have a fixed resolution. If your flower has a texture of 1024x1024 pixels, but uses, for example 2000x2000 pixels in your final image, the result won't be pretty.

If your want to reduce the size of the Poser objects, I would collapse all of the materials in each of the Poser models in Vue to maybe one or two materials (one for the skin, and one for the clothes).  Frankly, I think the bigger problem is going to be the amount of cpu and memory needed to compute the reflections on the water given the size of render you ar talking about.

...

Amount of polygons is not a predominant parameter in rendering process - like many users thinked.

Opinion that a huge amount of polygons required a long time rendering it's only pure guess-work. NONSENSE !

I have empirical opinion about rendering.

For all users VUE (POSER or the other 3D soft) which wanted rendering a big size pictures for printing I give the one advice.

Just TRY rendering !!!

More PRACTICE and less verbal opinion from users which probably never rendered that type pictures.

I rendered many works in VUE for printing on my old PC machine with only the one INTEL Core2 Quad processor and times of rendering oscillate from 2-3 hours (scenes with around 80.000.000 polygons)

to 36-58 hours (scenes with only around 10.000.000 polygons).

I use myself 'superb-ultra-extra' options of rendering which is better that factory 'ultra'.

Rendering the big sizes pictures for printing as much as possible even on 'common' PC machine without 6-8 GB memory and highest-level graphic card.

The huge memory and graphic card NOT TO DO A STROKE OF WORK when PC rendering !!!

In rendering process leader is only PROCESSOR !

Not memory, not memory on graphic card, not processor on graphic card !

The highest effective of the main PROCESSOR is the highest element in PC machine for rendering.

REMEMBER that when you buy new PC machine or you try render a big pictures for printing.

Only PROCESSOR !  

...

Um, wrong, you do know all that data has to be stored and worked on, especially for procedural terrains, so you WILL see a difference in memory usage.

Rememebr, this is RAY TRACING, so more pixels in the image..the more rays...the more computations...the more data....
the more polygons, the more interactions between the world objects and rays...

:)

One easy way to have an influence of the size of 3D objects is available rightaway in Vue itself.
After a model - Poser or not - is loaded into the scene, you just double-click on the object and the 'Polygon Mesh Objects' window opens.
There you have a variety of options, to change the size and detail of the 3D mesh and the mapping quality.
You can decimate and/or weld meshes, split materials, change map accuracy or quality overall and a few other things. All will help to get a smaller instance of the loaded object and will reduce at least the computer resources needs, overall size of the scene and maybe can help with render speed more or less, depending on the overall situaition.

Depending on the distance to the camera, the object can be decimated weaker or stronger, to show enough details for the given distance. Once you have changed an object in that way, just save it as a .vob-object, so you only need to do this once.

If you can setup this huge size of an image for render, maybe you can use 'Render Areas' and split the image in a few smaller rectangle areas to make sure, your PC won't lock up while calculating and combine the parts in a paint program later.
Sure this will only split the overall render time. But  it could help, too, to find some flaws in a rendered part and that way you don't have to wait to check for errors after the large full render.

Once i had to do a kinda large render for a calender print - 4350x3450 - but i needed to submit it in 300dpi - the 72dpi was only good enough for a preview ...