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Add-On For Blender Helps To Render Images For Print

21

Here's a nifty add-on for setting image size and resolution for (paper) prints. Developers are Marco Crippa (Krypt), updated by Dealga McArdle (zeffii).

Alan Britto writes:

If you must render an image for print, there is an Add-on for Blender that you should take a look. It is called “Render for Print” and it features some nice shortcuts for printing images. For instance, we can pick the size and DPI for an image, and the Add-on will do the math for us, and set the size in pixels of the render for that particular paper size and pixel density. And there are lots of presets with paper sizes!

Link

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

21 Comments

  1. Campbell Barton on

    One thing I've heard is that for color prints (anything rendering besides monochrome text / lines),
    you wont need to render at 300 'pixels per inch' to print on a 300 dpi printer since it uses a number of dots to make up the color of each pixel, if there is some rule of thumb for this, it could be good to include in the script so people don't render incredible large files for their 1200dpi printers :)

    • Then you  heard wrong. If you want anything printed professionally (offset or digital) as a rule of thumb you really need 300 dpi and yes, pixels per inch can beregarded as the one-on-one equivalent of dots per inch.
      Another rule of thumb is that the resolution in ppi/dpi has to be at least 2 times the lines per inch resolution.of the (offset or silkscreen) printer. But 300 dpi is the general standard.
      I am trained as Desk Top Publisher/Prepress with 7 years experience in an offset print shop so I have a little experience in this matter.

      • Oops. This all goes for bitmap based color images like photo's. Text is another matter because letters (=text) are vector based ant therefor resolution independant.

        • About dpi I have a question, 300dpi being the quality professional printing scale, this is in order to avoid seeing the pixels in the paper or for another reason? Sometimes I print web images that are of 72/96dpi (without rescaling) and they don't look nor small neither bad (and I mean that the pixels aren't obvious to see), well sometimes they look terrible not sure why tough, sometimes resetting the dpi makes them look better...

        •  Hey Jeroen

          I am working in a digital print shop and as I was using a Blender render for a little project, our graphics specialist was complaining that it was very nasty to get the Black color out of the rgb converting it to cmyk. I am not as professional as I wished, so how can I avoid these kind of problems already in rendering? I used ambient occlusion and I am wondering if I turned this to black and white this would alrady help. The people here are not very open-minded towards open-source software...BTW, this Addon will be a big help for convenience.

  2. Love the script, saves me a lot of calculator use. Now I can do some more DTP work using Blender. (I already made some A1 posters at 300 dpi with it for tradeshows... happy times).

  3. Ooh nice one! So needs to bundled with Blender. It's really starting to grow in leaps and bounds now with interface and underlying redesign.

  4. This can be very usefull.
    By the way, you forgot to credit the authors of the addon,they desserve it:
    Marco Crippa (Krypt), updated by Dealga McArdle (zeffii)

  5. I am also unable to download.  Certificate problem - "Certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain is provided".  Don't really know the reasons this can occur, so I won't speculate.

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