Ward2 // The Daily Render by Nikolas R. Schiller // Page Number 6

The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

|| 8/28/2005 || 5:10 pm || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Quilt #3

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

Using the new modified ‘square’ imagery in the rendering, there isn’t any distortion of the buildings that was present in the previous Georgetown renderings. I really like how the Whitehurst freeway makes the seams of the center! Since I like this rendering so much, I decided to delete the old White House Sunset zoomify page, and made this new one. Zoomify is sooo much fun! :-) Up next is an another Georgetown rendering, but this one is slightly different. Using the exact same source imagery from the USGS, I created a different mosaic arrangement. I think I’d have to make an animation of sorts to show this concept adequately! While maintaining the exact same spatial resolution and geographic location, the imagery can be flipped and arranged in such a way that there becomes a tessellation inverse. I look forward to comparing the results.

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|| 8/23/2005 || 8:45 am || 2 Comments Rendered || ||
Washington Monument Zoom

Image Links to Flash Player:

I made this animation for one of the main projects I’m working on right now, Operation Ceasefire. I’m going to make sure it ends up in the right person’s hands and hopefully it will be seen on a projection screen during the concert. I think the only real error in this rendering is that most people will be expecting to see the White House as it zooms out, but the tessellation only contains the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and some of the mall. Regardless, I think it looks pretty cool. If I had more time, I’d make a few more animations using this same imagery, but I’m not in the mood right now to do so. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, and I’m not sure if I’ll have much time to render anything for the next few days. But I guess, as I tend end my postings, we’ll see :-)

|| 8/22/2005 || 8:42 am || Comments Off || ||
DC Stencil

: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :

Following up with my “N Prague” rendering, I decided to do the same with Washington, DC. Its not technically special, but I’m glad I made it. I see being used a cover or sign for all of my DC based renderings. I should make my name and the “geospatial art” next. I’d like to make one with different imagery for each letter- it might take a bit longer to setup, but I think it will turn out really nice.

Related White House Entries:

|| 8/19/2005 || 5:33 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
White House Warp – geospatial animation

Image Links to Flash Player:

Wow. This is probably my favorite animation yet. Its not technically special, it’s just fun as a hell to watch. Using Quicktime Pro, I can set it loop back & forth and I’ve spent the last few minutes marveling at my latest creation. If you look closely you can see the White House replicating into a perfect circle.

Up next, I’ve got some imagery of Prague, Sioux City, Iowa, a few topographic maps (a new dimension to Geospatial Art!), and even a subway map of Moscow I want to geographically exploit. Fun.

Yeah for the 9 day weekend- I took next week off!

|| 8/9/2005 || 8:21 am || Comments Off || ||
Mall Mountain

: rendered at 15,000 X 10,000 pixels :

Going to foothills of the Appalachians and promoting an event on the National Mall, I felt compelled to combine the two :-)

One of the ideas that popped in my head during the trip was having a book titled “The Legend of Nikolas Â® Schiller.” Inside would be large prints of my work. The use of the word legend in a cartographic sense would be the description of my methods used to create my maps, like a legend on a map.

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|| 8/2/2005 || 5:12 pm || Comments Off || ||
White House Sunset

: rendered at 15,000 X 10,000 :

A bit off center eh? Although I called this rendering “White House Sunset,” its really the Convention Center sunset. The most noticable building is no more! The white building that’s repitition is a geographic identifier of where there are lines of symmetry, the old DC Convention Center, was demolished over a year ago and now the entire site lies fallow in the Central Business District of DC. But I had use the name “White House Sunset,” because this rendering has another bent White House.

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|| 7/31/2005 || 7:36 pm || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Quilt #2

: rendered at 15,000 X 10,000 :

This rendering marks a new stage in my artistic development. Through better understanding of my tools, I have switched from using flattened cylinders to using infinite planes. The geographic tessellation can now be projected to infinite without any degradation in spatial resolution. While the old way allowed me to do the same, I like having a new way to make new lines of symmetry.

This means the gigapixel or the terapixel(wha?) barrier can be surpassed, but my digital ceiling is limited to my iMac’s processing power- I need a G5. Some of the renderings from the Abstract Series were created at 20,000 X 15,000 (300 megapixels) but I’ve realized that it takes too long to process renderings that large. I’ve chosen to keep my current ceiling at 15,000 X 10,000 (150 megapixels), this way each rendering can fit as compressed TIFF (usually about 400-600mbs each) on a CD so I can easily back them up and make duplicates.

As for the outcome of this new development, the only drawback that I’ve found thus far is that the center tends to be darker. Due to the location of the radial light source and the artificial construct of infinity, the center appears darker and the edges appear lighter. I’m going to experiment with lighting and adding more lines of symmetry for my next rendering.

I’ve also learned that I need to make sure my modified imagery is an exact square in dimensions before I import it. In this rendering, the modified Georgetown imagery is like 4 times wide as it is tall and I noticed that there is some slight stretching of some of buildings on the ground and I want minimal distortions when possible.

Like Georgetown Lenz #2, I sincerely enjoy the way the Whitehurst Freeway and the Key Bridge make some of the most notable elements of this rendering. The lines of symmetry used were (0,60,120) and with each line of symmetry there were two more reflections from the imagery which created a total of 6 lines of radial symmetry. If you look closely you can see the bee’s wax hexagonal shape- love it!

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|| 7/2/2005 || 11:06 pm || Comments Off || ||
Lady Liberty on a quilt of the Pearl River Delta

This is my first “commissioned” piece. I mentioned it a while back, but it took my benefactor a little while to come through with what he wanted me to make. He is from Hong Kong, which is where the Pearl River Delta is, and I used a NASA satellite image of the Pearl River Delta a backdrop. On the body of the model I used the same modified aerial photography I’ve used in most of my DC based renderings (like DC Lenz #4). The contrast between the past and the present is what I like most about this rendering, and I sincerely hope that he likes print on his wall at his home or office!

Related Miscellaneous Renderings:

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|| 6/24/2005 || 10:57 pm || Comments Off || ||
DC Mandala

This rendering turned out well. I find it interesting that this rendering shares the same reflection point as the Mall Quilt second derivative. I can’t sell this one because it theoretically belongs to space imaging, but I’ll definitely keep this one around for donation/education purposes.

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|| 6/16/2005 || 10:37 pm || Comments Off || ||
Jefferson Mandala – 2nd derivative

I can’t go much further, or can I?
–probably to about 360X and then it will look like a vinyl record :)

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|| 6/12/2005 || 6:15 pm || Comments Off || ||
Jefferson Mandala

This rendering marks two significant pinnacles in my geographic artistry.

The biggest step is of making a complete mandala. Before my mandalas were only reflected 4 ways (north, south, east, west) , and now I am achieving reflections of over 8 ways (north-north east, east-north east, etc), which make the final products so much more intricate and in my opinion, far superior to my older maps.

Secondly, the source imagery used for this image was what I’d like to call first derivative geospatial imagery. I have coined term to signify that the source imagery is the first derivation of a previously rendered image. In the image above, I used the rendered imagery from the center of the Mall Quilt as my source imagery for this rendering.

With source imagery’s self-similar design it’s closer to the definition of a fractal. You can zoom into a fractal to infinite, and what I think I’ve created is in effect a geographic fractal where I can take derivatives of renderings and reproject them into infinity. Each derivation will be more reflected and abstract, but I will not lose the spatial resolution so long as the final rendered dimensions are not larger than the source imagery dimensions multiplied by the number of times the source imagery is completely shown.

For example, the source imagery used to make the image above was 6000X6000 pixels, however the image above was rendered at 12000X12000 pixels. I am able to reproject the imagery larger because the actual source imagery is used multiple times within the image and in essence is doubled by the way the source imagery tessellates. Notice how you see a mirror of the Jefferson Memorial (aka 2x for every reflection), the mirroring process allows for the geographic tessellation to not lose spatial resolution when the image is finally rendered. Theoretically, I could cut out the center of this rendering, and use for my next rendering, and it would technically be considered second derivative geospatial imagery…and I might just do that :)

If this is too confusing, I’m sorry. I too am still trying to get my mind around this concept. Regardless, expect some very beautiful renderings in the near future!

View the map’s close-up details using the interactive Flash application called Zoomify

View the Google Map of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC

This map was printed over a million times in newspapers around the world.

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|| 6/11/2005 || 8:47 pm || Comments Off || ||
Mall Quilt

: rendered at 12,000 X 8,000 :

love it!

…more about the first image above tomorrow…

==
So the white building near the center of rendering is the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service building. I’ve been to a few meetings there :)

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|| || 12:15 pm || Comments Off || ||
Jefferson Lenz

After having Bryce crash while I was setting up the scene, I was very excited to be able to replicate the exact positions of all the objects and to finally start the rendering of this image, albeit over an hour later. This is my first rendering where I’ve gone beyond the standard 4X & 8X reflection to 12X reflection. I am very excited about where this new discovery will take my next set of renderings. Next I am going to attempt to apply this technique to the “Quilt Project“.

As for the Jefferson Lenz itself, there is a slight error in the background where the two objects meet on the seam. Although you cannot see it in the scaled down version above, the two don’t line up perfectly symmetrical- which kinda sucks, but its because I rushed that part of the setup. I was too eager to get the rendering started because of the new central reflections I forgot to see if the background looked perfect or not.

Anyways, I’ll be making another rendering shortly with this imagery…which is actually the same imagery I used for the Washington Monument Lenz, but the way the reflections turned out, you can’t see the Washington Monument, except in the background. So it was going to called Washington Monument Lenz #2, but since you can only see the Jefferson Memorial, I named the rendering accordingly.

Yeah for the weekend!

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|| 6/5/2005 || 10:17 pm || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Lenz #2

The GWU Hospital makes an interesting center of the rendering. It’s a found circle of life, where the constant flux of existence lies in geometric harmony with its surroundings.

Whitehurst looks damn cool too.

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|| 6/1/2005 || 1:10 am || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Lenz

I think this one turned out excellent. What I like most is the way that M St. is on the edge of the rendering and at the dead center (zoom above) is the GWU hospital. I look forward to making Georgetown Lenz #2 using the same template as with DC Lenz #4!

I just started a commissioned piece, but instead of just rendering it outright, I setup the scene, saved the file, and then began making an AWESOME animation. Once the animation is finished the saved file will get the proper treatment too. Here’s a hint, you’ve never seen Baltimore like I am seeing it now!

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The Daily Render By

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future.