Mandala // The Daily Render by Nikolas R. Schiller // Page Number 2

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The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

|| 7/26/2005 || 12:01 pm || 2 Comments Rendered || ||
The Washington National Cathedral Mandala

I used the same imagery that I used to make the The Washington National Cathedral Lenz, but instead of placing the imagery into the Lenz template, I just used the 4 plane mandala template. The 4 planes then reflect 2 times giving a total of 8 lines of radial symmetry. What I like the most about this rendering is that I bent the Cathedral! I should have included that in one of the screenshots above because I have a small series of bent buildings that I’ve created in the last year or so. Of course my favorite is the White House (“Get Bent Bush!”). I’ll try to put the bent Cathedral on-line shortly.

Nonetheless, I think it looks awesome (as usual), but this rendering I actually over-projected by making the rendering larger than it needed to be. The beauty of the raster projection process is that I can merely scale down the final product in photoshop to correct it. Yet, this has happened time and time again with my most recent mandalas. I need to do the math before rendering them to make sure I don’t have to down sample each rendering. Naw— Go big!

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|| 7/18/2005 || 12:02 pm || Comments Off || ||
Ballwin Mandala

This rendering turned out nicely, although I rendered it too large and had to scale down the projection to remove some pixilation. This rendering is also the first derivative of the Ballwin Lenz #2, and I was able to keep my old apartment building at 148 G Cumberland Park Ln. within the rendering. You gotta love art that hits close to home! (I say this everytime!!!!)

View my posting on the first Ballwin rendering.
View my posting on the second Ballwin rendering.

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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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|| 6/22/2005 || 12:09 am || Comments Off || ||
Baltimore Mandala Animated

Image Links to Flash Player:

Its nice to take a good healthy spin & zoom….

This is my first animated mandala, and I am quite pleased with the results.
…I wonder what tomorrow will bring!

|| 6/21/2005 || 2:25 pm || Comments Off || ||
Baltimore Mandala

The way the inner harbor is reflected makes this rendering all the more beautiful. There is a small artifact in the center of this image that creates a found focal point that, when printed out, will draw the viewer’s eyes directly to the center of the rendering. This rendering is also the first rendering that I actually made too big! When looking at it’s full 9,000 X 9,000 size, the ground looks slightly fuzzy, yet this is not really a problem! The way I look at it is that I might as well make it as big as possible because I can always shrink it without any degradation. I wonder what I’ll make next!

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|| 6/20/2005 || 6:32 pm || Comments Off || ||
Ganges Mandala

Not too shabby :) I like the way the rivers intertwine and form braided streams. This manipulated satellite image is probably the most famous of all the “Earth As Art” collection. It was used for the cover of the Library of Congress flyer as well as the UNEP 2004 Environment Report. I have already sold a print of this one. Its the purple & green!

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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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|| 6/14/2005 || 6:57 am || Comments Off || ||
911 Mandala

Last week I made a rendering I unofficially called “the circle of life,” and this week I’ve made a “circle of death” (above). Last week’s “circle of life” was at the center of the rendering (the GWU Hospital), and this one has the circle of death around the edge of the mandala in the form of the smoke of the World Trade Towers burning. The exact site of the World Trade Center falls just outside of this rendering, in Post 911 Reflection #3 you can see a better, albeit abstracted, view of what New York City looked like September 15th, 2001. While the planes were grounded throughout the United States, the IKONOS satellite was floating silently by recording the space, place, time, and recent history.

Time to go to Capitol Hill to help give a briefing on Geographic Management Systems :)

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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.