I was working on tracking down the memory leak in P5Sunflow, so I needed some large input. Well, that and I wanted to dust off the printer from the days of yore. So, what would a ball of squiggles look like when the target is 24 by 24 inches at 300 DPI? Well...
And even the detailed box is scaled down quite a bit. Here's a neat Google Maps style thing to play with:
2,500 ribbons. The scene file was just under 300M. It took Sunflow about 7 hours to do the whole thing. I have to say, that is a fine piece of software. I was watching its memory very closely. I gave it 2 gigs of RAM to use, it shot up to 908M after a minute or two, and just stayed there. I don't know if you've ever seen the tell-tale sawtooth of your average Java program's memory usage, but this wasn't it. Sunflow, literally, throughout the 7 hours, didn't deviate more than a megabyte. There is truly some magic going on in there.
So, I just printed this fella out. After seeing it on paper, looking at it on a computer feels pretty stupid. There's something neat about huge high-resolution prints. You can so easily juggle the scale and the detail at the same time. It kind of seems impossible on a monitor. That, and anything will look good on watercolor paper. You can quote me on that.
Also, I fiddled with the RSS feed the other day. Sorry if I spammed you.