Just out of curiosity, What's the largest image that you've ever rendered. I'm wondering because I just rendered a 20000x15000 image in UF (see my most recent image, Never Ending Math Equation).
So, How Big Do you go?

I've done 24000 x 18000 in fractint, good enuf 4 a 4x6 foot wall poster if I could find a way to have it printed ...

My biggest has been 13900x16000. Not quite as large as yours but mine was 107 layers. Took around 90 hours with one 2.53GHz P4, one 2.2GHz Athlon and one 3.46GHz dual-core Intel 955 Extreme working together in a network render. I only render that big if it's something I'm going to have printed. No need for it to be that big otherwise.

Rick

107 layers? Yowzer!

With interpolation i render a few images 16004x10256x(12*12 interpolation)
.

Mainly 3200x3200 or 3200x2400.  To be quite honest I am afraid of going bigger as a notice pops up saying " You have chosen to render a very large image...are you sure you want to do this?  Well I thought I was, and therefore I take a chance, but it always seems ok, if a long time in so doing.  If it can't do it will it say so?

i aint afraid of anything, working with an image of 42,520x12,000@72dpi which took about 4 hours to change to 88,583x29,528@300dpi and that isn't the biggest i have worked with

uhm... why you ask?

why do i ask? i was just curious, and i was wondering if i really was pushing the limits of UF and the other programs. (FYI, i've never gone above 4200x4200 in apo, and that took 36 hours to render)

 12,000 x 12,000 in FE - took almost 80 hours. Normally I render at 12,000 x 9,000 and 10-20 hours isn't unusual.

i see that a lot of you render very big.

but i wonder: what is the purpose of doing so?

are my images sharper ? can i still see them in total on my screen?

monica

with fractals, esp. in UF, i find that there is less detail lost when i scale it down, and i can do really big zooms without re-rendering. and besides, if i want i can print a mural.

Just for curiosity I did a UF render at 55 000 pxl at resolution 300 and normal anti-aliasing, just one layer, pretty slow formule and very slow coloring. Took about 20 hours, including the pressure I was giving to the machine using other stuff meanwhile.

I did one 2048 x 5557 it took 2 and a half days to render of course I was working as well durning that time. Now I'm ready to print it up. Wish me luck.

Therese

I've rendered some very large images. Most of the time when I finish an image, I render a 4,000-pixel version in UF, with one level of anti-aliasing (effectively, 12,000 pixels on the longest side). Since I print these at 200ppi, this is enough for a 20" print, and that's what I sell most often.

Occasionally, though, I will render larger. I have done a 48"x18" print at 400ppi (special request), which when you factor in the anti-aliasing works out to be 57,600 x 21,600 pixels. I once prepared a 7'x5' (yes, feet) image, but that was only 150ppi, so it was only 37,800 x 27,000. And for the ICM exhibition in Spain I did a couple at 12,000 pixels, so the effective size was 36,000 x 18,858.

The amount of time it takes to render any image is going to depend on how fast your computer is, how fast your software is, and how demanding your image is. The image I just uploaded took nine and a half hours to render at 4,000 (12,000 when you count the AA). That's using Ultra Fractal 4 and five computers, about 15GHz of power total. (I should add my wife's new laptop... wonder if she'd object...) But to do that render, I had to interrupt another render that's been going for... 590 hours, and has 919 hours to go. Rykk loaned me the use of his farm for a bit to help out with the long render, but it's still going to be a few weeks before it's done. This is the longest render for me so far, topping my previous 900-hour record (that I can now render in 100 hours due to upgraded computers).

That's another thing that I've noticed. My newer images almost always take longer to render than my old ones. I recently sold a print of a ten-year-old image; back when I made it, it took hours to render a 1,024 x 768 version, and I had to assemble the layers by hand afterwards. Now I can render the entire thing at 8,000 x 6,000 with full anti-aliasing (effectively 24,000 x 18,000) and the entire job is done in nine hours, automatically assembled. That's a 500-fold increase in speed, or roughly doubling in speed every year. Moore's Law was never so sweet.

For the most part, when I make an image I'm aiming for 10-20 hours to render the 20" print size. That means staying away from some formulas or settings on formulas that are too slow, unless I'm in a serious tinkering mood or the image absolutely doesn't work any other way. The most annoying thing is when I discover I've got a particular effect that requires heavy anti-aliasing to render properly; the 100-hour render I referred to above required two full levels of anti-aliasing to render properly, for an effective resolution of 36,000 x 27,000. And it was slow as mud to begin with.

Ten years from now we'll wonder at the simplicity of the fractals we're creating today.