I know it's an old topic but I'm setting my render size around the 2000 res and I wondered if that was too high. The Poser manual reckons you can't see any difference with the human eye if you go higher than 1500 but I'm not so sure, maybe I'm wrong though.

That depends on what you are going to use the picture for. For web use, that might be sufficient. If you plan to make a poster, it's a different story.

That seems reasonable to me, sure :). I do larger ones regularly.

Laurie

bigger pics make postwork easier ;-) I have rendered at 5000+

In my experiance larger posters go to smaller dpi unless you want a big photo.

Poser should handle 2400 x 3000 without a big problem . Thats 8 x 10 at 300 dpi.

For web use anything larger than the screen size is a bit of a waste. I hate scrolling to see a pic.

The main reason I render to large resolutions is for detail and quality of the image. I may render an image up to 4000 and shrink it to 1024 and sharpen the image in photoshop before posting it. This seems to add details that don't show up in a smaller render. I first noticed it with dragon renders. When I rendered the dragon image small the scales really didn't come out very well, but when I rendered it large and then shrunk it and sharpened it, they were detailed and clear. This is just my experence, it may be different for different people.

First, determine what the rendered image will be used for.

On-screen viewing (web etc.): anything larger than 1800 x 1200 or thereabouts is probably overkill.

Offset Litho: determine the physical dimensions at which it will be printed (e.g. a half page, 6" x 8") and multiply those dimesions by the required pixels per inch - usually 300ppi. For our example, that would require a render of 1800 pixels x 2400 pixels. (Your "2000 res" render would be fine, as long as you mean that you're rendering to 2000 pixels.)

Large format inkjet: again, determine the physical dimensions at which it will be printed and the required pixels per inch. This is, emphatically, not the same thing as the printer's resolution expressed in dots (not pixels) per inch. So if you're given a figure like 720, 1200, 1440 or more dots per inch whoever you got it from has no idea what they're doing. For the absolutely finest quality you'll seldom need more than 240ppi. For display / exhibition graphics, you'll get away with 120ppi or even less.

Let's say you need to render to produce a huge poster, 5ft x 8ft. That's 60" x 96". If you render to provide a resolution of 100ppi at the final size, you need 6000px x 9600px. A big render, but not too crazy.

Already said, but:

Even for web images, postwork is easier on a bigger image. Shrink it after. Works very well.

For print, render as big as you can stand. You can calculate to exact dimensions what you'll need, but then, sure enough, there's a decent chance that a year later, you'll wish it was just a bit bigger. This is especially true if you think you might ever sell your renders. Someone will want the exact image in your gallery, but they'll want it cropped a certain way and still maintain similar resolution, and you'll wish you had a bigger original.

If you don't do postwork, it's not as big of a deal, as you can always just save the PZ3 and re-render whenever you want.

well, I have a 2 foot wide printer (HP Z3100) and often render at 7200x5600 at 300 dpi.  It processes pretty fast on my machine (dual xeon) so the time is not an issue.  Seems to render fine at that high of a setting and it prints well.