Mindy,

I once rendered an image that took 900 hours to render, just for a 20x15 print. Between upgrading my main workstation (3x faster) and adding a render farm (another 3x faster) I can now render the same image in just 100 hours.

Yes, my computers sputter and spasm when asked to render certain images. I have a theory about this; we explore to the limits of our patience. When we get faster computers, we never just enjoy the faster speed by doing the same kind of artwork faster; instead, we explore new things that we just didn't have the patience to deal with before. Dealing with five PCs to get one render done is not exactly my idea of convenient, but with even that render on tonight's image threatening to take thirty hours, I'm glad I have the resources available. No matter what, this art form is capable of humbling even the most bleeding-edge computers.

At least I'm not trying to render 8000x6000 flames. (Yet.)

--Damien