Rendering super high resolution

[chrsmith]

Hi all,

I need to render something over 40,000 pixels wide for a huge printed trade show display. I believe I'm hitting a file size limit at ~2.5GB. Has anyone else had to render something very large? Is there a workaround whereby the render can be split into several smaller files using one camera perspective that can be stitched together seamlessly in Photoshop?

Thanks!

Christine Smith

Engineering Visualization Resource

Northrop Grumman

[DanBode]

I don't know anything about a file size limit, but in Houdini 12 you can split up your render into tiles that will fit together seamlessly. Check the "tile render" check box in the Properties->Output tab on your Mantra Rop. You'll then get three sliders that let you set the number of horizontal and vertical tiles, and select which tile to render.

I thought there was supposed to be a utility to stitch the tiles together, but I cant seem to find any information on it now. Photoshop should be able to handle it though.

[chrsmith]

I'm using Houdini 10.0.465. I seem to recall hearing about this kind of option years ago, but I don't see it in the Output tab in my version.

I don't know anything about a file size limit, but in Houdini 12 you can split up your render into tiles that will fit together seamlessly. Check the "tile render" check box in the Properties->Output tab on your Mantra Rop. You'll then get three sliders that let you set the number of horizontal and vertical tiles, and select which tile to render.

I thought there was supposed to be a utility to stitch the tiles together, but I cant seem to find any information on it now. Photoshop should be able to handle it though.

[crunch]

Hi all,

I need to render something over 40,000 pixels wide for a huge printed trade show display. I believe I'm hitting a file size limit at ~2.5GB. Has anyone else had to render something very large? Is there a workaround whereby the render can be split into several smaller files using one camera perspective that can be stitched together seamlessly in Photoshop?

Thanks!

Christine Smith

Engineering Visualization Resource

Northrop Grumman

What image format are you saving to?

  % ic -w 40000 m.pic = Mandril.pic
  % icp m.pic m.exr

works for me... Though converting .pic to .exr used over 18GB.

However, running "iinfo -i m.pic" causes a crash, so perhaps there are some functions which don't work on huge images.

[DanBode]

Oh I'm pretty sure the tile render check box was new in version 12. In h10 you should be able to duplicate your camera a few times and adjust the left, right, bottom, and top crop sliders in the view tab to isolate different portions of the image you want to render.

[chrsmith]

To Crunch: Ok, so jpg, rat, and bmp didn't work, but it .pic did. I was able to open it in hview and resave out as a jpg.

To DanBode: As for the Crop parameters for the camera, a test render shows that it will still try to make the full res file and only render the crop portion. What I think I would need is for it to render a file that is sized to just the cropped resolution. I still haven't figured out for sure whether it's resolution size or file size that was the culprit. If it's file size, that probably would be alleviated by rendering only small portions of the image. So your idea just might work as well. Since the large .pic render works, I won't worry about it for now. But yes,I think this is what I had heard about years ago.

So it looks like rendering as .pic is the way to go.

Thanks all for your help!

Christine

[edward]

As for the Crop parameters for the camera, a test render shows that it will still try to make the full res file and only render the crop portion.

If you're outputting to .tiff or .pic, then the created image file will only have data for the crop region. However, it will contain meta data to indicate where the crop region resides in the full-resolution image. This is for convenience so that one can just load all the images into a compositor to composite without manually positioning each file to the right place.