Lead a Horse to Water was : some :-)) and more beginner tutorials ;-)
Hi Neil : Man , that is some huge post of good info . I really have to ask , however , with a little imagination could you not have used some of this info in a very small tutorial ? You say no need for a tute , then you write this big long email (that will disappear forever into the void in a matter of days) . Except for the few people who actually took the time to read the whole thing , it's very close to being a wasted efort , compared to a tiny HTML tute that is sitting comfortably on a few servers around the world . Thanks very much for your time , but I don't really have any- plans to print anything right now (I'll hang onto your mail) . HTML tute's ... they're free , they have a long shelf life , they're entertaining to read (even if you just look at the pict- ures ...) , they are always there for newcomers to learn from , or help longtime community members upgrade their skills . Let me put it this way ... what if I had just wrote about my cool experience with RS displacement mapping in an email ? How much would that have helped anyone compared to the experience of doing a step-by-step learning experience ? http://www.studiodynamics.net/tutes/planet1.html Then again , I'm amazed at how much I actually learned simply because I wanted to try and make the tute interesting to others . It's a win-win-win situation when someone actually makes the commitment to teach others effectively . (rant-mode / off) studio www.niagara.com/~studio www.studiodynamics.net Hi Garry, No tutorial needed since the way to render as bmp is all that is needed and is in render options as well as the manual. Get your models done, line up the lights, set your camera and render to file as bmp. Tutorial finished. Print requirements depend entirely on printing device/machine. The people who know exactly the optimum file parameters are the people (the Printers) who own and run each device. Go to those people for file parameters. This answer could profitably stop right there but here's some more anyway. So, render to bmp in RealSoft. Convert to whatever the Printers want or let them do so if needed. Render large file sizes since these can be reduced if necessary at little or no loss in sharpness (resolution) but small files can not be so easily enlarged without image distortions like pixellation, etc., showing. However don't be scared, if all you have is a small image lifted from a website then that's all you have. Massage it as much as you can in Photoshop or whatever (I use PhotoPaint) and get on with it. The rule is simple what you are looking at will be what is printed unless someone messes up and they usually dont. For USA Letter size paper and A4 the usual for Offset is about 300dpi so files over 25 megs have more than enough information for top results. DPI means Dots per Inch, it more or less means pixels per inch, therefore with a calculator in hand you can sort out the dpi for anything you need. A small confusion might occur if you dig deeper and come across LPI which is an old screen ruling term that Platemakers used when converting photographs to printed dots. These days just let the Printer worry about this side of things since there are optimum rulings for each of the machines on his factory floor plus, if the file is clean enough he might run stochastic ruling which is fun. A good machine will easily handle 175 lpi but unless it's newsprint, flexographics (on cartons usually) or silk screen dont accept anything less than 133 lpi. A small trick here is a frequency clash that can happen between a printed image that has been printed using dots (LPI) and the reprinting of a scan of that again using dots ... the effect is called moire and can be a horror. Best to press the remove moire button in PhotoShop after scanning before handing it over to the Printer ... except they will usually see what's going on and fix it or hand it back to you for fixing. The file size is the total dot/pixel count multiplied by the number of channels multiplied by the information type in the channels used ... CMYK used Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black which is four channels and if it is in 32 bit format then .. etc. RGB used three channels and is generally 24 bit. Straight Line Art, or Black and White is One Bit ... so yes, these can be very very high resolution with relatively small file sizes ... I usually run Line Art files at no less than 600 dpi. Greyscale is generally 8 bit ... an 8 bit pixel object can carry 256 values of grey from white through to black. So, you might want the render to fill an A4, you will render to bmp as mentioned. Your camera aspect ratio will be 1.41 (if the A4 is portrait format and 0.71 if it's landscape) ... I use 1.5 and 0.75 so that I can crop the image if I want to ... anyway, rough enough. A long edge pixel count of 8000 is heaps ... which more or less gives 8000 x 5600
Re: Lead a Horse to Water was : some :-)) and more beginner tutorials ;-)
Hi Garry, Yeah, it got away from me, it was after midnight, sorry about the book. Regardless of format, it's hard data so will be text heavy. I'll do a bit of work on it sometime and post it to my site ... maybe send a copy to Robert too in case he feels it would be useful on his site. Thanks for the push, Neil Cooke - Original Message - From: studio [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: user-list@light.realsoft3d.com Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 12:54 PM Subject: Lead a Horse to Water was : some :-)) and more beginner tutorials ;-) Hi Neil : Man , that is some huge post of good info . I really have to ask , however , with a little imagination could you not have used some of this info in a very small tutorial ? You say no need for a tute , then you write this big long email (that will disappear forever into the void in a matter of days) . Except for the few people who actually took the time to read the whole thing , it's very close to being a wasted efort , compared to a tiny HTML tute that is sitting comfortably on a few servers around the world . Thanks very much for your time , but I don't really have any- plans to print anything right now (I'll hang onto your mail) . HTML tute's ... they're free , they have a long shelf life , they're entertaining to read (even if you just look at the pict- ures ...) , they are always there for newcomers to learn from , or help longtime community members upgrade their skills . Let me put it this way ... what if I had just wrote about my cool experience with RS displacement mapping in an email ? How much would that have helped anyone compared to the experience of doing a step-by-step learning experience ? http://www.studiodynamics.net/tutes/planet1.html Then again , I'm amazed at how much I actually learned simply because I wanted to try and make the tute interesting to others . It's a win-win-win situation when someone actually makes the commitment to teach others effectively . (rant-mode / off) studio www.niagara.com/~studio www.studiodynamics.net Hi Garry, No tutorial needed since the way to render as bmp is all that is needed and is in render options as well as the manual. Get your models done, line up the lights, set your camera and render to file as bmp. Tutorial finished. Print requirements depend entirely on printing device/machine. The people who know exactly the optimum file parameters are the people (the Printers) who own and run each device. Go to those people for file parameters. This answer could profitably stop right there but here's some more anyway. So, render to bmp in RealSoft. Convert to whatever the Printers want or let them do so if needed. Render large file sizes since these can be reduced if necessary at little or no loss in sharpness (resolution) but small files can not be so easily enlarged without image distortions like pixellation, etc., showing. However don't be scared, if all you have is a small image lifted from a website then that's all you have. Massage it as much as you can in Photoshop or whatever (I use PhotoPaint) and get on with it. The rule is simple what you are looking at will be what is printed unless someone messes up and they usually dont. For USA Letter size paper and A4 the usual for Offset is about 300dpi so files over 25 megs have more than enough information for top results. DPI means Dots per Inch, it more or less means pixels per inch, therefore with a calculator in hand you can sort out the dpi for anything you need. A small confusion might occur if you dig deeper and come across LPI which is an old screen ruling term that Platemakers used when converting photographs to printed dots. These days just let the Printer worry about this side of things since there are optimum rulings for each of the machines on his factory floor plus, if the file is clean enough he might run stochastic ruling which is fun. A good machine will easily handle 175 lpi but unless it's newsprint, flexographics (on cartons usually) or silk screen dont accept anything less than 133 lpi. A small trick here is a frequency clash that can happen between a printed image that has been printed using dots (LPI) and the reprinting of a scan of that again using dots ... the effect is called moire and can be a horror. Best to press the remove moire button in PhotoShop after scanning before handing it over to the Printer ... except they will usually see what's going on and fix it or hand it back to you for fixing. The file size is the total dot/pixel count multiplied by the number of channels multiplied by the information type in the channels used ... CMYK used Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black which is four channels and if it is in 32 bit format then .. etc. RGB used three channels and is generally 24 bit. Straight Line Art, or Black and White is One Bit ... so yes, these can be very very high resolution with relatively small file sizes ... I usually run Line Art files at no less than 600
