Thanks Jeffrey, great tip. For rendering, I need all the tips I can get!

How do you raise the image precision? Is that the quality setting (draft, high, best, etc)?

Never mind, I found it under custom. So just crank that up, eh? I'll have to check that out. Thanks for the tip.

Well, only crank it up as much as needed. One of the most common mistakes with Rendering is to set everything to 'Best' without really understanding what's going on. For who doesn't want a 'best' image, eh? ;-)

I think the UI for this could be renamed to be much more helpful, things like 'Slow but Nice' and 'Faster but not as nice' would help everyone out a lot more than 'Best'.

Anyways, only crank something as high as it's needed to get a decent image, and no higher.

Makes sense. Here's a question though, what do you use to get a rendering to print nice? I know they have the screen and printer resolutions. Usually, my screen looks great on screen, but prints horribly even when everything is cranked up.

If I render it to printer @ 600 it's over 250MB file! 300 dpi is 56M file and takes an hour or longer for an exterior rendering. So how do you get a nice rendering that looks clean when printed?

Well, what's happening is that you're probably rendering Camera views, which can default to being tiny size-wise. Or, your rendering an axon view, which tend to be huge, depending on scale.

What you need to do is click on the outside border of your camera view, then click on the View Size button that shows up on the Ribbon. Check the 'real' size of your view. This is the size it will be when you put it on a sheet. This size is interrelated to the DPI, in that these are the 'I's in the DPI.

So if you've got a view that's got a real size of only 2" x 2", and set it to 150 DPI, that's actually 2" x 2" x 150 pixels, or an image that is 300 pixels on a side. That's low. Think about your monitor, that's probably north of 1000 pixels on a side, right?

Or, conversely, you've got an Axon view, where the size is set by the scale of the view and it's crop. That view might actually be 20" on a side. Set that to 150 DPI, and now you've got an image that's 3,000 pixels on a side. That's huge! It's going to take forever.

So set the image size to be what you want it to print at first, then when you go to render, set the DPI to what you're aiming for. I rarely go above 150-300 range, but I size my Views to be 5" to 7" on a side, depending.

If you look at the top of the Render Dialog, it will show you the Pixel size of your render. If it's set to screen, watch as you zoom in and out, and see how the numbers change? That's due to the fact that Screen means the size of the view on the current screen. Set it to print, and it will show you the Pixel size. You want it to be about 1000 on a side for a decent image, but 800 or so is good enough most of the time.

Remember that doubling the DPI or the size of the image quadruples the amount of information in the image, thus making the render time take a lot longer!

That's why I could never resize my camera views! That tip right there will make my life so much easier. I feel like I should have known that already though. lol Rep for sure. :beer:

Hi Jeffrey great to see you here as well.
On the score of image precision, I agree with your comments however, from testing I have found over time that an Image Precision setting above 6 does not yield much better quality but does severely protract render times.
I have an old machine now and accept that fast machines will provide an opportunity to set up higher levels for quality however, I feel settng 7 or 8 ofr IP is a waste of time.

Blurry Reflections are a useful tool to smooth things out in tandem.

once again, great to see you over here Jeffrey.
kind regards
tombe

Yeah, you want to set things just as high as they need to be and no higher. What results you're getting are more important that whatever specific numbers I post here. ;-)

I've got an i7 945 Intel with an SSD drive, and I do a lot of furniture and interior renderings where the 7 setting on the detail helps bring out more of the high-resolution bitmaps we're using for the wood grain and such. I've not gotten better results with an 8 instead, I usually set it at 7. We don't usually have blurry reflections, so I turn that WAY down, for I find that it really adds a lot of time to a render to have blurry reflections look nice. I'll actually swap out reflective things for just simply shiney things if I feel I can get away with it!

Easiest method for a fast exterior rendering:
That's it.