Houston Quilt - The Daily Render by Nikolas R. Schiller

Houston Quilt
|| 12/20/2005 || 10:20 pm || Comments Off on Houston Quilt || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Houston Quilt by Nikolas Schiller

Like Providence, I have yet to visit downtown Houston, however I can still manipulate the city to some degree. Today’s degree is to the tune of about 60 :-) 360 divided by 60 equals 6 (which equals 3 lines of symmetry which I call “seams” of the quilt) and judging by my last quilts, I’ve found this number to be my favorite degree of manipulation.

So far I’ve made about 39 different quilts (multi-planar maps), and I think it is about time to begin the subdivision of the quilt project into the number seams each quilt has. This means I have to create a sub-category for each number of seams, and then go back through every blog entry and assign each quilt to it’s respective category. This will allow a casual visitor to this site the ability to look at all of the quilts at once or by each respective number of seams.

Starting at 2 seams, like the Ivan Memory (the first quilt) and Beverly Hills Quilt #3, then to 3 seams, like today’s quilt, and then quilts that have greater than 4 seams. This categorization of the quilt project will be helpful in the long run because it will show the ways the geographic tessellations react when reflected multiple times and more importantly it will help organize what has been my favorite projection of 2005.

As for Houston Quilt, the imagery is from 2002 from the USGS (of course!) and I modified the imagery in such a way that the center of the tessellation is Highway 45 and the high-rise buildings of downtown Houston surround it.

The drawback of this imagery, similar to my Denver imagery, is that the aerial photograph was taken in the afternoon and due to the angle of illumination, the shadows obscure much of the ground. Yet this can also be a nice aspect too because the shadows also reflect and make the rendering special in their own way.

I’d rather have the photograph taken from nadir (straight above) at noon on cloudless, sunny day (this eliminates shadows and distortion at the center of the scene). But of course that would be too easy right? :-)

The other drawback is that the imagery itself is somewhat devoid of colors. Granted the sensors did pick up colors, but they are not very vibrant. When looking at the map above it almost appears to be black & white, but when you look at the details you can see some color.

Maybe I should go in and modify the imagery again and add color? In the past, the closest I’ve gotten to doing that was embedding my name into the imagery, and that wasn’t that special. The Boston imagery is still some of my favorite imagery because of the color variations and the good news it that I also downloaded imagery of downtown Houston from 2004 which has an interesting patch of different colored imagery in. When tessellated, this imagery will add that colorful dimension this map currently lacks. First I have to prepare the imagery and I think I might just make another map using the Houston imagery. I was thinking of maybe a 2 seamed map or should it be 4? I’ll find out soon!

==Update==
I ultimately used the geometric shape instead of the lines of symmetry for my naming convention.

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