Rendering physical camera,

[Anonymous]

I use the physical camera rendering mainly because I have 2D objects in the drawing and I need to get rid off the traslucent box (for not opening photoshop ). During the rendering the procedure stuck out, so I wonder if I can change some values so I can still render in physical camera without getting stuck over and over again.

[Anonymous]

How do you render a simple scene of 4000X2000 pixels with physical camera. It is almost impossible to me. It takes a lot of time.

[Erwin Edel]

4000x2000 is quite high res, nearly full A3 at 300 dpi, unless you are going to print that large (A3), consider something smaller. Also most screens will be 'just' HD so 1920x1080, wich is about half of that size too. Doubling an image for the 'rare' 4K screen user should still look good enough.

I render 195x135 mm at 300 dpi images that print fine when I scale them up to A4, which would be about 200 dpi when printing. If you have a good printer, 150 dpi should still be good enough for printing. 300 dpi and up I would consider for profesional offset printing, but maybe someone with more experience / know-how will disagree. I just know this works fine on our Xerox C60 and the Canon Imagepress C1 we had before that.

Depending on the global illumination settings it will take a while especially for interior renders.

If you are making a 'final' render for a billboard or professional printwork, sure, go all out on settings, however if it is for a client briefing and you are likely to make the same render (or similar) many times, I would try to make it look 'good enough'. Personally I start out with a the low presets like 'outdoor daylight fast (physical)'. Swap out the weather preset to a nice looking sky, remember to keep using ArchiCAD sun position for more control over where shadows go. In detailed settings under 'Environment > Clouds' turn off 'cast shadows', it looks bad and takes up render time. Under 'global illumination' start out with the 'preview' presets (exterior / interior). Exterior will be the lowest quality, but more than fine for exterior shots, for interior use the 'interior' ones, or you will get spots due to low GI. Finally under 'options > general options' make sure you set ray treshold to 0 for the best reflections, ray depth and reflection depth to something like 10-12 to allow for enough layers of transparancy (glass!) to render.

This is just a quick way to get started. Do some post production in photoshop with adjustment layers (desaturate 20%), slap on the name of your company in case the image gets shared around and just re-use these layers when you need to do the render again.

I also do some sketch render overlays and water colour effects in photoshop to make the whole thing look a bit more sketchy so I don't have to have super photo-realism, but that is sort of personal taste.

[Anonymous]

In my company they ask an A3 size pictures. So as far as I know to print up to A3 I always used 300dpi. But I asume that you can't use it with physical render. Eve if I lower the resolution to 200dpi I think I will I have problems with physical render. I asume that physical render should be for low size pic, perhaps 2000X1000 or about.

I agree with photoshop, if Archicad can't render in layers it isn't worthy to render separately. I will post a thread regarding postproduction.
Thx

[Erwin Edel]

Try upgrading the RAM on your machine, that should help a bit with render times, I think. 16 GB is pretty much the minimum required.

Do they allways print at A3 or do they want to have the option to do so? You could offer to render out bigger if they need it and explain that rendering for A4 will cut the render times in half.

Or render in the background and keep working.

I don't do a lot of interior renders, but exterior renders with these settings for our typical large villa type houses take at max. 3 minutes to render. If I upscale to your size, I'd say about 12 mins