I started a render last week for the print size version of my entry to the cover magazine contest - 2550x2894 pixels, 300 dpi. Vue announced a good 25h time left when it started.... and finished 4 days later with a nice 96 hours 15 mins ! I never let it run that long, especially to render to disk, but it worked just fine. That got me thinking - What is your longest render ?

For a calender we did some years ago, three weeks with Bryce :-))) At the moment i try to render an image in 3500 x 2650 and the first (serious) guess of Vue was 179 hours! After 3 days (=40%) my trainee tried out something in PowerPoint on that machine and crashed the system. Very close to be fired!!

G'Day last Dec did a 5MB poly scene, 150MB file, took 36hrs, that was on a 866Mhz, p3,with 64mb card at the time, just did the same on a 2.53,P4,1.5GB ram,and was down to 16 hrs, much is pc dependent though, size, ram, etc abnd the quality rendered, lights ,shadow etc.

So far my longest render was in Bryce...3 days it ran for. I went out of town and left it and when I came back it was in wire frame I almost cried. I yelled at every cat in the house before my husband owned up to it. "I just wanted to see if it was frozen..." I almost killed him.. :D

Well, that's why we disconnected mouse and keyboard when we did our 3 weeks rendering - exactly that. We were totally afraid, that someone (the cleaning people) passes by and by accident will crash the whole thing. Even when i now do an overnight rendering here, i take the mouse away from the Wacom tablet, so nothing can happen there by accident.

104 hour with vue 2, about 2 years ago. 3 weeks? Got to have a lot of patience... ;)

Monday morning, 8.40 am Last friday (around 6 pm) i started a render to disk of this image: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=405388&Start=19&Artist=wabe&ByArtist=Yes 3500 x 3500 pixels, final mode. Today i got the message you can see. I think i give up. 17% done in more than two days? Too much! It's a Mac, 867 MHz, 1GB memory, OS 10.2.6. Maybe when i go on holiday for a week or two i will try to let it render probably.

What speeds up render time? New graphics card with higher memory? or a faster processor? I'm getting a new system and it's something i'd like to fix...so...

Graphic cards only speed up display while you are working interactively. Rendering means calculating pixel by pixel through the processor, so a fast processor and as much memory as possible is important here,