Rendering For Print Publishing

[AA74]

Hi all!

I was wondering if some of you has any suggestion for rendering at a higher resolution,

for print publishing purposes; I'm trying the camera resolution presets over HD but i get a blank file after waiting for a while.

So i guess mantra is doing something but then it stops when it has to write the image. Then if I'm trying

with PAL or less it works normally. Is it a memory problem? I already used the rendering options in maya to split the

image in smaller tiles so they render separately. Is there in mantra something similar?

Thanks for any kind of suggestion :-)

Cheers

Andrea

p.s.: the resolution i have to reach is 8125x10625, to get an image size of 1950x2550 at a resolution of 300dpi

[crunch]

Hi all!

I was wondering if some of you has any suggestion for rendering at a higher resolution,

for print publishing purposes; I'm trying the camera resolution presets over HD but i get a blank file after waiting for a while.

So i guess mantra is doing something but then it stops when it has to write the image. Then if I'm trying

with PAL or less it works normally. Is it a memory problem? I already used the rendering options in maya to split the

image in smaller tiles so they render separately. Is there in mantra something similar?

Thanks for any kind of suggestion :-)

Cheers

Andrea

p.s.: the resolution i have to reach is 8125x10625, to get an image size of 1950x2550 at a resolution of 300dpi

You might try rendering with -Va (alfred progress) which will print out a message when mantra completes a tile.

Does the mantra process die? Or is it still running? How much memory is the mantra process using?

I believe that http://www.dougstruthers.com/portfolio/index.htm has done some renderings for print.

[Jason]

Then if I'm trying with PAL or less it works normally.

This may be a silly question, but are you using Apprentice? If so, it won't render above PAL resolution.

[AA74]

Hi!

ok, so,

at the moment, I'm still at the VFS completing the Houdini program.

here we use the 8.1.874 build ; I was wandering that maybe it's an educational version and so it doesn't allow for

high high res renderings; I will check it tomorrow! (actually at the moment i can render until HD, then, over it simply stops)

for resolutions higher than HD mantra seems to start normally, then it simply stops; looking at the system monitor, it dies too, after using 1.9GB of RAM (we have 2GB on a linux system) and part of the swap (1.2GB of 3.9GB);

I set up the mantra render command as follow: mantra -s 2 -Va

but I'm not seeing any kind of information about tiles on the terminal window. I think it's stopping just before

to start writing the image. Actually if I try to open the file just produced with gimp, it is simply an empty file, with no header at all, so it's totally 0 bytes

maybe because I'm using a lot of displacement and some reflections ...?

[Jason]

If you attempt to render just a plain sphere at a high resolution, does it work? i.e is it your scene thats causing a Mantra crash, perhaps? I assume you're rendering to an image and not to mplay directly, correct? (I thought maybe MPlay could be crashing at such high resolutions if rendering interactively)

Otherwise, try to render alternate formats - like a .exr or an .rgb or something other than .tif files...

[sibarrick]

The best thing to do to render very high print res images using mantra is to use the crop parameters in the camera and make several smaller image tiles, you can then comp the result together in cops afterwards.

Its far more stable and quicker to render large images that way.

I've even gone so far as to have a python script that chops up a single ifd for exactly this purpose.

[AA74]

Hi!

sorry for the delay, it took me a while :-)

Really thanks for the advises, i got the images;

I changed the file format in exr and rendered cropping the image;

then assembled in photoshop

here are a couple of stills

www.3dartist.it/print/still_ocean_11.hip.0067_1950x2550_04_print_B_01_lens_ctr_site.jpg

www.3dartist.it/print/still_ocean_11.hip.0067_1950x2550_04_print_A_site.jpg

Cheers!

Andrea