Cineversity

Hello,

I’m designing a template for something I’m cutting out.

In Cinema4d, I designed my shapes at the correct size in mm. Now, I’d like to send it to the ink jet printer, and have it print out exactly the correct size. Is that possible, and if so, any pointers for how to do it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks, Michael

Hi Michael,

Edit: Lennart (see below) explains is perfectly, so I deleted my suggestion here/Edit

Alternative, export as DXF to Illustrator, to get a vector based result like from a CAD application, if that is needed.
All the best

Sassi

Thanks, Sassi, those are very helpful ideas! All best, Michael

It’s pretty simple and straight forward actually, and I use this technique when doing exact fits for big screen projections
but the same things applies to print.

The settings from internal units to external units (print etc)
are related to the zoom of a Front (or any flat) camera as well as
your printer printing at 100%. That means no scaling or “fit to page” settings active on your printer.

In your Front cam you use this formula:
1/outputwidth*1024.

So if you want to print a 10x10 cm rectangle on a standard
A4 paper (width 21cm) , you set your zoom to:

1/21*1024

You can type all the number directly into the zoom and it will
calculate it and in this case it will be 48.762.

Do your render (at A4 render settings) and print!

Cheers
Lennart

Thanks Lennart, very nice of you.
Yes the print settings and the zoom leads to a simpler version of what I tried to explain above. So I have edited my post.
I’m not clear about the 1024 thought. Based on your nice suggestion, my idea would have resulted in 10/21*100 or target printsize/papersize*% (measuring in the same units) for the zoom (based on your example 0.47619048, which is pretty close to yours, sorry if I’m a bean counter here), but Michael will give feedback, what works for him.
The width and hight can be given in cm if you think in DinA4 sizes, thanks for pointing that out.

I would love to know where the 1024 comes from, what do I miss? Is that the projection resolution?

Best

Sassi

My guess is that Maxon set 1024 to be “computer bitmap size” as zoom 1.
(1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte (MB))
It could possible be connected to how OpenGL bitmaps are treated.
I had to figure that out a couple of years ago by trial and error
for the kind of project I worked with.
I posted that finding over at CGTalk at the time when people
looked for a way to render arcviz prints.

Anyway, it’s proven very useful in my work
for critical LED projections as well as work for
creating content for projecting on buildings and such

Cheers
Lennart

Thanks again Lennart for your efforts.

I got it! It is obvious that the 1024 factor is there, based on my current tests. Thanks for mentioning it, it delivered me finally an answer. Which means there is something going on that is not correct at all. If I set the zoom to 100% and the render format to 10x10cm, then the cube with 10x10cm should fill the render area, but it doesn’t. (I had set up the resolution to 100 pixel per cm, to measure it in Photoshop)

Here I see the reason why I suggested the reference guide in my initial post (I shouldn’t have given up and suggest a workaround), as I did not got something correct out of a mathematical correct set up… I have done over years print stuff (with Illustrator) for a world wide producing company, with print houses all over the world, precision is key there. So this here is not acceptable… Go figure.

Thanks for the 1024 or the 102.4% zoom factor. It lead to the problem and I think it needs to be fixed . At least from my perspective. (I have filed a report, and I hope people file a report to MAXON if something is not correct, instead of using workarounds… myself included!)

All the best

Sassi

Hi Dr Sassi.
Maybe we are misunderstanding each other. But to me it works as it should:)

For a A4 print using 1/21*1024 makes a 10x10cm (units) rectangle
measure 10x10cm on my printer. (Any size of object will be correct)

To make the rectangle -fill- the render I use:
1/10*1024. <- This is independent of output settings!

To me, the way it works (and I don’t think it’s a workaround but correct) is:
1k = 1024 as in digital film (2k = 2048, 4k = 4096 etc)

So in Cinema, Maxon have set 1024x1024 as default zoom (zoom = 1).
This is the coverage of -units- in the viewport and is actually independent
of the render output. This is a very good thing as one can render at any
real world scale (i.e.LED screen having a physical size and leds per area
or back screen projections having a physical size and media needing
minimum resolution for retina and/or streaming capacity)

So basically I see no need to change this behavior as it would make things
vary complicated.

Cheers
Lennart

Well, I’m going to test it all out, and thanks very much