It took him months to discover a file format that could accommodate such large amounts of data. The first candidate was TIFF, widely used in scientific applications and in the VFX industry, but the format maxes out at 4 gigabytes and cannot have values, including length or width, greater than 2 to the power of 32. This was not enough for the powerful creation of Eggplant. Fortunately, he discovered the ideal replacement, BigTIFF, which can handle images in the terapixel range and is supposed to allow values up to 2 to the power of 64.
When you look at the photo of the world’s largest penis, a couple of things immediately jump out at you. First of all, you will probably notice that you are lacking in girth. Measuring 23,760 x 4,294,620,000 pixels, its length is more than 180,000 times as long as its width. “It’s very disproportionate, sure,” admitted Berenjena.
“That is a real technical thing that I was faced with,” he continued. “The BigTIFF format claims to allow 2 to 64 power pixels, but when I tried it, it broke. There must be some legacy code related to the regular TIFF that only supports up to 2 to the 32nd power. That couldn’t happen, so I had to squeeze it.”
You will also probably notice that this penis has no balls. “I needed to use as much image real estate as possible,” Eggplant said. “No gaps, which means the width of the axis should be the full width of the image. It would have been strange to incorporate testicles with these proportions. It just didn’t feel quite right.”
After choosing the perfect image format, the next step was to work on a methodology to generate the actual image. He created a custom algorithm capable of reproducing the branching patterns of veins we see in nature. The algorithm ensured that the vein patterns were continuous and not repetitive.
The next order of business was to figure out how to render the image. “I found my computer over a hundred times doing this,” she said. “The problem with images of this astronomical size is that they consume a lot of resources and I wasn’t working on a supercomputer like the one I was using at NASA. Programs like Photoshop and even advanced tools like ImageMagick are incapable of producing images in the terapixel range.”
Since there are no tools on the market that can handle a penis of this size, Eggplant had to develop their own software to do it. He needed the help of an expert and, since he did not want to reveal what he was creating, he posed as an “insider” in some forums and online groups, posing as a microbiologist or astronomer. “With a few questions answered,” he said, “I got back to work and finally created a program that balanced the memory, compression, and disk usage needed to create an image in the terapixel range.”
The final image was generated over a five-week period during which Eggplant’s custom software created sections of the penis at 30 million pixels per second. Once this was done, he knew that he had something bigger than an NFT on his hands. Having successfully created what appeared to be the largest image ever made, he decided to approach the Guinness World Records organization.