Orthographic Views in Scale...

[dmf-123]

Hey Guys,

Forgive me if this question has already been answered. I have a vague memory of seeing a related thread before, but can't seem to find it now...

Working at an architectural firm, I'm often asked to render elevations, sections, and sometimes floor plans, and print them at a particular architectural scale. What we've always done is render them at a comfortable resolution and then scale them up or down in Photoshop (either adjusting the image size or the scale of the rendered image itself) to force them to fit a desired scale when printed. This always works, but can be rather laborious -figuring out the appropriate scaling factor required to meet a particular standard. Not to mention, the results aren't terribly accurate because I rarely do it mathematically, instead just adjust until it is 'good enough' ...

After doing this for the 100th time, I'm thinking there has got to be a simpler way to do this. So my question is: Is there a system that would allow rendering orthographic views, such floor plans or elevations, that automatically fits a particular scale? I know the obvious answer is to use CAD or Revit to generate your elevations, but is there a way to do this in Max so that it is perfectly right every time . . ?

Obviously Max and Vray don't care about DPI or print dimensions, but I do notice that Photoshop seems to always open a rendered image at 72 DPI, so the default document size is at least someway correlated with the rendered pixel dimensions...

Does anyone have a clever way of dealing with this..? Or am I missing something obvious..?

[Lehm_2001]

Well there's a few ways to go about this. I would probably tackle it like this.

1. First you need to render to a specific size. Easiest way I know is to set your ortho camera to 90deg fov. Then your render width is double the target distance. So lets say you have a building that's 150ft across. You'd probably want to render 200' wide so set your target distance to 100'.

2. Next you need to know how large to render in pixels. So basically take the dpi you wish to print at (we'll do 100dpi just for simplicities sake though that's a little low in practice), convert to feet so 1200 dpf and multiply that by your render width. 1200x200'=240,000pixels.

3. Apply your scale factor to that number. So if you were doing 1/4"=1' =1/48 scale. So divide 240,000 by 48 = 5000pixels wide.

4. As long as you print out to the same dpi, 100 in this case, it should be accurate.

There may be simpler ways to go about it, but this is how I would handle it.

[dmf-123]

Excellent. I gave that a try, and it works like a charm. Thanks for the tip Lem_2001. I'll use this on my next project.

I suppose one could write a script, where you could pick a camera and it would generate the appropriate resolutions for a series of scales, and print dpi, right?

Well, until I learn how to write scripts, I'll do it your way.