It seems like there are a lot of misconceptions here as well as some apparent misunderstandings of things I've posted previously. I'll try to address each issue in the order it was posted. This will be a long message as there is a lot to reply to. Skip down to where I mention your name if you're only interested in replies to your questions.
First, to mr-miley: I think you will find that the vast majority of prints above portfolio size (roughly 8x11) are *printed* at 100-200dpi, usually about 150. 200-300dpi is often requested for the source files and in some cases provides better results depending on how the printer
RIP (raster image processor) handles the bitmap processing. But usually this is just specified so that there is a buffer and the RIP can downsample appropriately. Ultimately a 1:1 render to print resolution is usually most ideal and efficient, but you do need to know the details of the printer's capabilities.
Furthermore a high quality printer with a sophisticated RIP can do as much as 2x upsampling with very good results, primarily because it's done at print time and in a way that meshes best with the capabilities of the printer. With that in mind if you aim for 150 or at most 200DPI you should be fine, as long as your print target is poster-sized (above 8.5.x11).
I'm not sure where you get the 4000dpi requirement for "fine art" prints (no generally available printers that work at sizes above 4x6 are capable of *true* 4000dpi printing period). Art prints are generally not printed above 600dpi and the difference between 300 and 600 is literally indistinguishable at a normal gallery or home viewing distance. The vast majority of "art" prints are made at 300dpi or less. For example the well-known CHROMIRA and Giclée print processes are targeted at 300dpi natively by most print houses. These are processes used for prints in the finest art galleries the world over. You may find these articles of interest
http://www.allpconline.com/giclee_dpi.htm http://desktoppub.about.com/od/resolution/a/lpichart.htm There is also a significant difference between the fundamental process used for home inkjet printing and most production processes such as those used for commercial-grade posters (so "dpi" capabilities of a home inkjet aren't going to equate to the same level of quality in a commercial print). Furthermore there is a difference between both of those and true "fine art" prints (which will cost you a good deal more than an average poster print at $15-30). Source file resolution above 600dpi is seldom necessary or advantageous in any of them however.
It's possible you're simply confusing scanning resolution (for scanning slide or traditional film for example) with print resolution. Slide scanning is routinely done at 4800dpi and above.
The problems you had rendering in TG 0.9 at sizes above 6000x4500 were probably related to memory and may have been solveable by reducing the render buffer size to something like 5mb. 1GB of memory is not very much to be rendering at such resolutions (and is surprisingly low for a dual 3Ghz Xeon). The image buffer alone, not counting antialiasing buffers and other memory needed for rendering, is 81MB at 6000x4500. That gets multiplied by your antialiasing level by I believe up to 4x (for Ultra) and is combined with memory needed for terrain rendering, render buffer, etc.
From my own testing on a machine with a similar amount of memory I found the maximum possible render resolution was about 11,500x11,500. This was consistent across multiple scenes and generally required use of a 5mb render buffer. I tested on another machine with 3GB of RAM and found the same results so this seems to be the practical limit with TG 0.9 on a PC, regardless of additional memory. On a Mac use of the Render To Disk feature made higher resolutions possible. We plan to include a similar feature in TG2 for the final release.
In any case you can rest assured that we are well aware of the issues with render time and know what level of improvement is necessary to be competitive in the market. Optimization is clearly needed and is a large mark on our "to do" list before final release.
Terragen 2 is a combined value proposal of quality, capabilities and ultimately speed. If you examine only one aspect - speed in this case - then it may not be competitive, even in the final release. But ask yourself if you can achieve the same level of quality and realism in any other application and in lesser time. If the answer is yes then perhaps TG is either not appropriate for your needs, or is simply non-competitive. The latter is something we at Planetside have to struggle with on our own, and we have full intentions to bring performance up to the best level it can be by the time of the final release later this year. Your own choices in applications for your work are up to you, of course. But it only makes sense to reserve judgment on the product's commercial applicability until the final release with all features and optimization in place (although several major effects studios are already using it in production even in its current state).
Buzzzzz: Certainly rendering for print output is being considered in TG2's development. I haven't done any specific print tests at this point, but I'm very familiar with the resolution that is fundamentally necessary to produce quality prints. I have printed photo-quality output from a variety of home-oriented inkjets as well as local print shop processes, online "on demand" print sources (CafePress, Zazzle), as well as "fine art" print sources. I have no illusions that the higher quality of TG2 output as compared to TG 0.9 changes the fundamental need for high resolutions in print source files and I think it's a bit strange to have concluded that from my earlier messages.
What I was actually saying saying is only that the downsampling approach used to get maximum quality with TG 0.9 should no longer be necessary with TG2. I consider downsampling to be a separate consideration from baseline resolution necessary for a given print size, so I was not at all implying that you could use say 72dpi output from TG2 to get equivalent results of a 150dpi (*after* dowsampling) TG 0.9 render. Rather I am saying that an equivalent 150dpi render in TG2 could be made natively at the target resolution, while you would need to render at twice that resolution and then downsample to get the same overall level of quality with TG 0.9.
The reason for this is that TG 0.9 lacked appropriate levels of detail, antialiasing, etc. TG2 can theoretically use any level of detail, AA, etc. that you want, and in general using an appropriate balance of detail settings will get you a high quality image in less time than rendering at 2x resolution and downsampling. You can count on a 4x increase in render time for every doubling of render resolution in each dimension (the total pixel area is 4x more). Increasing AA, detail, and other settings in appropriate measures can give you the necessary detail with a potentially much lower increase in render time.
Also just as a small note, don't read too much into the specific features, fixes, etc. that you see in the updates. Development is not a strictly linear process and there are many things still cooking in the ovens that will come out as more significant changes in the future, closer to release. Feature implementation is not likely to be a linear process so you shouldn't necessarily expect to see a steady growth in that regard. The end result is what matters.
Cyber-Angel: We do plan a boxed version of TG2 but many high-end, expensive products are sold completely digitally now and the digital distribution approach is more and more widely accepted. I don't think boxed distribution is any kind of pre-requisite for a successful high end graphics product.
As far as marketing, do you really think it would be appropriate to spend significant amounts of money on high profile marketing efforts at this point with the product in its current state? Of course we will market the product properly; after all, it's in our best interest. In fact the Technology Preview is part of our marketing plan and we feel it has done a great job of accomplishing our goals. But it makes little sense to have a huge marketing push at this time and I think if you look at the history of any significant new product (Maxwell and Vray are both good examples), they absolutely did not start out with such high levels of marketing when they were as early in development and sales as we are with TG2.
Both Maxwell and Vray are now more established, with lots of sales, high profile clients, etc. They can afford to pay for that level of marketing and their level of income demands it in order to ensure necessary levels of market expansion. For us it takes a much lower level of marketing to impact our registration levels to a significant degree, and this fits nicely with the smaller overall company and income levels we are working with. If we had multi-million dollar profits yearly we might want to do big print ads, but for now we're starting small and building the brand appropriately, not jumping the gun straight away with expensive advertising before we even have a final shipping product.
I think if you look at where we are in development and in the market then you'll agree this makes sense. If TG2 is released commercially and you still see a lack of marketing *at that time* it would be a much more appropriate time to call attention to it.
calico: Having native DPI control is really unnecessary for any rendering application. It is often included as a convenience, to help people to know what resolution is necessary for a given size print, but the actual DPI specification in rendering has no bearing whatsoever on the resulting render quality. It is only the specific render resolution that matters. You could render an image at 6000x4500 and 72dpi, which equates to an 83x62 inch print, and then simply adjust the DPI later in your image editor (as most people must do anyway) to get a 300dpi print at 20x15 inches. This is very common. Likewise you could do the reverse, if you wish.
The dpi specification in an image file is largely meaningless until it is printed and even then due to print scaling and other factors it often doesn't translate. It is useful mostly for reference and ease of setting appropriate render resolutions for an application like TG2. As such we may include it as a nicety, but it's certainly not required for good quality print output.
- Oshyan
