Here are 2 Renderings we (moxi ltd.) did for a Fashion Outlet called Fashion Fish (in switzerland). It was actually one of my first finished Renderings in Blender and i had no idea what problems i might face.
The files were printed 10x2.4 meters and 7.8x2.4 meters large. The biggest Problem was to render these beasts… I didn’t know that Blender Render output was limited to 10000x10000 pixel Size, so i tried to Render the file with the “Panorama” Option. The computers i used for rendering (P4, 3GHZ, 1GB Ram and Dual G5 2GHZ Mac with 2GB Ram) couldn’t handle the huge output and Blender crashed every time (i think it was mainly a memory problem).
To get the job done, i turned all my animated Objects (Particles and Softbodies) into static (Static Particles, baked Softbodies) and did a Camera Animation (Rotation around Local Y Axis) to render vertical Stripes (4600x8000 px) of the Image which could then be “puzzled” together to a big Panorama Image. I used 4 Computers to render the parts, 2 Computers only had 512mb Ram, so they crashed quite a lot
That’s why i can’t tell you how long the rendering process actually took. It was more than 48h though.
The final Renderings where:
25752 x 8000 Pixels (made of six 4700x8000 Pixel Stripes)
and 32713 x 8000 Pixels large (made of eight 4600x8000 Pixel Stripes)
Heres a 1:1 Sample
And here you can see one Print in the Store
I hope you guys like the Results. And maybe this Post can help somebody who wants to render Files that are bigger than 10k x 10k pixels.
I have to ask how you modeled the “smiley” fish (i.e. the red one)? I’ve been trying to do something similar (3d smiley(s)) and I can’t seem to get anything satisfactory. Any hints will be greatly appreciated.
Awesome!!! Only crit is that I like the yellow fish better (its more detailed) and that I think it would have been better if he was on the front.
You’re right, the yellow fish shows more details. The red fish in the front however, is a 3D Version of the Fashion Fish Logo. Thats why he had do be in the front
I have to ask how you modeled the “smiley” fish (i.e. the red one)? I’ve been trying to do something similar (3d smiley(s)) and I can’t seem to get anything satisfactory. Any hints will be greatly appreciated.
I just took a UV Sphere and extruded the fins. I then used Edge weighting (Shift E) to make them “sharper”.
The mouth and eyes are scaled Spheres. I used a Lattice to deform the Mouth and the “rear Fin”.
What was the size of the final image and how did you “print” it ?
7.8 x 2.4 meters and 10 x 2.4 meters. It was then plotted (inkjet)
Edit: Hmm maybe you mean Filesize? The smaller one was 329MB (CMYK TIFF with LZW Compression) and the larger one 449MB (CMYK TIFF, LZW)
The smaller one was 329MB (CMYK TIFF with LZW Compression) and the larger one 449MB (CMYK TIFF, LZW)
Yes I was talking about the size of the file. 400 MB, it’s really impressive but the project was also impressive.
Congratulations!
This is some pretty AWESOME work! i love ur style man!
Big fan of u! ^^
Can i get a big size (to fit into my desktop wich is width 1280) of the first panorama img (the one with orange corals) to my desktop so i can see this wonderfull art all day long ?
This looks great! May I make a suggestion…
I work at a company that makes printing software for banners just like that. Because the software can upsample the image if needed you didn’t need to worry about rendering it so large. What resolution was it printed at? Typically a banner that size will be printed at 300 dpi or less. In fact, billboards are typically 30 dpi because you won’t be looking at it close up. Now at 300 dpi it is ~10800 pixels for 10 Meters. You can easily half that for the render since the software does a great job of up-sampling the image (this is easily done because it becomes halftone data for the printer).
Anyhow, it is great to see Blender used in such an awesome way! The image is great, I am impressed!
/me sends some wishlists to Ton to fix the problems you’ve had.
That would be cool!
is it all over switzerland or only in one shop?
It’s just one Outlet. A huge one though. I don’t think there will be any branches in the near future
Can i get a big size (to fit into my desktop wich is width 1280) of the first panorama img (the one with orange corals) to my desktop so i can see this wonderfull art all day long ?
This looks great! May I make a suggestion…
I work at a company that makes printing software for banners just like that. Because the software can upsample the image if needed you didn’t need to worry about rendering it so large. What resolution was it printed at? Typically a banner that size will be printed at 300 dpi or less. In fact, billboards are typically 30 dpi because you won’t be looking at it close up. Now at 300 dpi it is ~10800 pixels for 10 Meters. You can easily half that for the render since the software does a great job of up-sampling the image (this is easily done because it becomes halftone data for the printer).
I’m sorry, but i think you’re a bit off with your math. 10 Meters = 1000 cm. 1000 cm / 2.54 = 393.7 inches * 300 = 118’110 pixels. Thats 10times as big as you mentioned. Our final Images had roughly 80dpi. Of course higher resolution would have been better, but it wasn’t possible because of a limited timeframe as well as the restrictions from Blender.
Yep it’s impressive, I think it was a shame Blender was restricted by the Frame size limit but if it could run a calculation to compensate, so it rendered the image size you entered by tilling X images by Y images then stitching them together. That would be a good feature And congrats on completing the project. GOOD WORK!
I’m sorry, but i think you’re a bit off with your math. 10 Meters = 1000 cm. 1000 cm / 2.54 = 393.7 inches * 300 = 118’110 pixels. Thats 10times as big as you mentioned. Our final Images had roughly 80dpi. Of course higher resolution would have been better, but it wasn’t possible because of a limited timeframe as well as the restrictions from Blender.
Sorry, I was in a hurry when I typed this in and missed a zero. Anyhow you can do the math for 80 dpi to see what you need (still ~3 times more that the 10,000 pixel limit). The Blender limitation is too bad, I hope they get a fix in for it. One of the biggest challenges that Blender will face is managing the memory to disk balancing act. When dealing with large images you can’t always count on there being enough RAM to hold all the information you need. Our software will output files in the GB range (I have had to rendered 80 MB tiff into a 4GB output file to test for a bug!) so it deals typically with one line of image data at a time. I beleive that Blender must work with much more than 1 line at a time in order to rasterize it properly. Also the tif file format is capable of only 2 GB unless you have the latest library and that only goes up to 4 GB. We had to create our own image file format to handle larger images. I have seen a 10GB output file and I know there are larger.
At 10000 pixels you are looking at 40000 bytes of data so about 3 lines makes ~1 MB of data (this is not including the data used to calculate materials, reflections, ray-tracing, etc…). You can see that this adds up pretty fast when working with a larger image. It could be a tough problem to solve since not everybody has 1 GB of RAM or more in their systems.
I believe that for this application the entire image needs to be stored in the 3D vector type format (primitives, meshes, etc…) and then rasterized. If OSA is enabled the number you choose is the minimum number of image lines that need to be loaded in memory at the same time in order to calculate how one pixel affects and is affected by its surrounding pixels (or is it that how many lines on all sides of a pixel, doubling the number of lines required?). Maybe I will download the source code to see how the image data is being handled. Then I could either fix it or give a suggestion to those working more closly with the source. I’ll have to see if I have the time to look into it.
