Rendering for poster size print.

bicc39

I come from a photography background, none of my renders are for animation.
I have created a series of scenes which I wish to render with the ultimate goal
of producing 16x20 prints. There will be quite a few.
The Scenes themselves are tightly composited.
If rendering times are not a factor, what is a setting for rendering that will give
me a 16x20 poster print with the ultimate quality and resolution.
Thank you

FirstBastion

multiply the 16" x 20" by atleast 300 d.p.i. (dots per inch)

so 4800 x 6000 pixels

bicc39

Just by doing this I will retain quality?
Again, do not care about rendering time.
I wish to render a tif that will be converted to jpeg in Photoshop and uploaded as 16x20 size.
There will be a batch of these, price and rendering time are not a factor.
Realize that converting to Jpeg from tiff, I will lose in compression.
Need to render at the highest resolution, quality possible.
Just the multiplying will do it?
Thank you

JimmyC_2009

DAZ Studio can produce renders of up to 10,000 x 10,000 pixels (NOT pixels per inch)

If you multiply out what FirstBastion has explained, then you will get the correct pixel size to set your render to.

Since you are doing 16 x 20 prints (inches I hope?) then if you multiply both the width and height by the number of [pixels you want per inch, that will give you the correct render size. You will need to select the correct DPI in Photoshop for what you want, but the render size will give you the correct number of pixels to do that.

Richard Haseltine

Remember to turn resample off in PS when "resizing" - you don't want to change the pixels, just the PPI (which is a number at the front of the file, a 300PPI pixel is exactly the same as a 72PPI pixel - the only difference is how large they are when printed). However, you don't necessarily need 300PPI for a poster, unless you are expecting people to pick it up and look at it close-to. One thing you do need to watch is the quality of the assets - if you are rendering a portrait with the head pretty much filling the image then the resolution of the head texture (probably no more than 4,000 pixels) is going to be a limit on how much detail you can pack in - 4,000 pixels spread over roughly 20 inches would be around 200 PPI.

bicc39

Thank you all, as you might guess this is important to me.
One of the largest orders, I have ever gotten.
PPI or Dpi?

Richard Haseltine

PPI is for images, DPI is for printers. usually the PPI will be lower than the printer's DPI, since it needs multiple dots to get the same range of colours as a single pixel offers.

jestmart

If the printer can handle it you should leave the image a .tif as .jpg introduces compression artifacts that will reduce the quality.

Mistara

can only get my ds to 9,999 pixels :)

cwichura

I think the OP is asking if there are other 3Delight settings they should consider tweaking to optimize render results at higher resolutions. I don't use 3Delight, so can't provide an answer to this. Shading Rate? Anything that might influence MIP map scaling to avoid texture downrezing on objects? Etc.

With LuxRender, which I use for all my renders, there is nothing to change other than the resolution. However, you might want/need to reduce the outlier rejection settings and collapse to a single light group to keep RAM consumption down in Lux (for example at 13,500x13x500, 1 light group, OR=1 consumes ~48-60GB of RAM when using LuxRender -- I know as I've done it several times now).