Rendering Resolutions
By Lee Brown
Dec 15, 2003
Being able to drive a high resolutions for a rendering is important for a couple of reasons. First, say client X calls you and says they would like to make a promotional fyler that includes a 5"x7" rendering of the house you designed. In order to make the designer of the flyer happy, they will need an uncompressed image rendered at 300 pixels per inch at 5"x7". That would mean you would have to render a file that was at least 1500 x 2100 pixels of resolution. In addition, that would not allow the flyer designer to crop the image at all to meet his or her design objectives. Therfore, you should render a notch higher, which would allow the designer to crop in without sacrificing the required 300 pixels per inch. Printing presses can see about 300 ppi. Anything lower results in a lower quality print job. A 72dpi image would result in noticable pixels in the final printed piece. Trade show graphics need to be rendered at 101ppi at 100% of actual size. So, a 36" x 60" trade show graphic would need to be rendered at about 3600 x 6000 pixels of resolution. I did a trade show graphic once in Photoshop that was a whopping 270MB! Second, notice the enhanced edge detail in higher res sample below. The overall qualtiy of the render gets better with the higher resolution because it can "see" more of the image as it renders. This will also give you a lot more flexibility in post processing because you will have more to work with. Many folks post process their renders in Photoshop to get it just right. Just think of how much more effective your level, color, contrast and unsharp mask filters will be when there is more information in the file to work with. Notice how the door detail is starting to come out in the example at the bottom. I'm sure this would get even better at the resolution is increased. Think of it as a higher megapixel digital camera. My 10D shots at 6.3MP look a lot better that my old 1MP shots because the sensor can see more though the higher resolution.
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