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sebby_man
Participant
January 16, 2011
Question

"The rasterized image exceeded the maximum bounds for saving to the PNG format"

  • January 16, 2011
  • 2 replies
  • 25260 views

Hi everyone, I'm using Illustrator CS4 and encountering the following problem:

I made a level map in illustrator that exceeds 10000x10000 pixels. When I try to export the image as a PNG, I get the error "Could not complete this operation. The rasterized image exceeded the maximum bounds for saving to the PNG format". I tried saving in JPG and others as well, but got similar errors.

How can I get around this?

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    2 replies

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    sebby_manAuthor
    Participant
    January 17, 2011

    The reason for the huge bitmaps is that I am drawing levels for my flash game in Illustrator. Based on the current scale of all the characters/items, the level maps need to lie within a 4000x4000 to 12000x12000 pixel range. Yesterday I was finally able to export the png by using another computer with CS5 and better over-all specs. But yeah, what I'm doing is sort of crazy.

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    _Jongware_-9BC6tI
    Inspiring
    January 17, 2011

    Is this to be a true-color image, or a color-palette one?

    Let me do some calculations for you:

    4000 x 4000, true color (3 bytes -- I'm assuming no alpha here) = 48,000,000 bytes (approx. 45 MB)

    12,000 x 12,000, true color = 411 MB (!)

    Games with levels of this size don't have their levels as one big continuous bitmap. It takes up loads of memory, and it's much to unwieldy. Look up "tile-based maps", and be amazed.

    Even if you have 1,000 different tiles, each 64 x 64, they'll only add up to about 12MB, and one map can be a thousand times a thousand tiles -- equal to 64,000 x 64,000 "pixels" -- and still only use 2 MB of space.

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    sebby_manAuthor
    Participant
    January 17, 2011

    Well I thought about doing something tile based, but I have tons of gradients and glows, and overall the level design would not easily work with a tile based structure. This is an example of the general look (its a top down space shooter). The png file size for this level (4121x2269 px) is 527 kb, so its not actually that bad. Also, before I import these huge bitmaps into flash I have been splitting them into several pieces using ImageMagick.


    Also, I have imported this level into my game and it runs just fine. Because only a small portion of the level is on display at once on my 700x550 swf, flash does not have to kill itself by showing the entire image.

    markerline
    markerline
    Inspiring
    January 16, 2011

    Can you try to export/save as Illustrator PDF and open the PDF in Photoshop?  Then you can try to save your raster image as a TIFF which should have a very large bounding box capability.  Alternatively, for very large raster images you can save as PSB (which essentially stands for Photoshop "Big") from within Photoshop.  I would check wikipedia or some other online resource to see what the size limitations are of various file formats.  It would help if I looked it up myself just for knowing's sake.

    markerline
    markerline
    Inspiring
    January 16, 2011

    Have a look at this link:

    http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=79805

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    _Jongware_-9BC6tI
    Inspiring
    January 17, 2011

    Here is an interesting discussion: http://bytes.com/topic/php/answers/735556-png-maximum-dimensions

    -- although the dimensions there are way larger than your paltry 10K x 10K. It appearts not to be a limitation of the PNG format, but solely from the software used.

    Here's a question. What on earth do you think you need 10K x 10K PNG files for?

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