The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

White House Mandala
|| 10/24/2005 || 7:13 am || Comments Off on White House Mandala || ||

: rendered at 12,000 X 12,000 :

I fixed the lighting problem that plagued my last two renderings and the result is probably one of my favorite mandalas yet (my favorite is still the Ballwin mandala). I was able to fix the lighting issue by pulling the light source farther away from the imagery and then making the light source brighter. The result is more diffusion of the light without the center being bleached out. If you look at the rendering details below, you can see the the center of the rendering is the Ellipse and without realizing it, I made an circle out of the Ellipse :-)

rendering details:

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Adams Morgan Lenz #2
|| 10/23/2005 || 8:58 am || Comments Off on Adams Morgan Lenz #2 || ||

: rendered at 10,000 X 7,500 :

rendering details:

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Me, Maui, Mall Mandala
|| 10/22/2005 || 4:26 pm || Comments Off on Me, Maui, Mall Mandala || ||

: rendered at 9,000 X 9,000 :

I found out this morning that it only takes about 2-4 hours to render these mandalas, so I’ve decided to make one more! So much faster than the 8-12 hours they normally take :)

This rendering suffers from the same problems that plagued the last mandala rendering, the poor choice of lighting. Yet due to the nature of the source imagery used in this rendering, the light gradient isn’t as a big of an issue. Being my 3rd self-portrait, I am please how it turned out, but I don’t like using my name in the title of a rendering, but “self-portrait mandala” just didn’t sound right.

rendering detail:

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Adams Morgan Mandala
|| 10/21/2005 || 7:09 pm || Comments Off on Adams Morgan Mandala || ||

: rendered at 9,000 X 9,000 :
Adams Morgan Mandala by Nikolas Schiller

I like this rendering, but the way I setup the lighting is not the way I wanted it to look. Its far too bleached out at the center… and well, I’ve never liked the colors in this imagery in the first place. The reason why this took place is because I saved the template file after making the last mandala rendering, the Buena Park Mandala. Oh well.

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Adams Morgan Lenz
|| 10/20/2005 || 7:04 pm || Comments Off on Adams Morgan Lenz || ||

: rendered at 10,000 X 7,500 :

The last rendering I made for the Lenz Project was back on July 22nd, so I figured that it was about time to make another. I definitely like the way it turned out because I rotated the central plane at a 45 degree angle and it made the intersection of 18th & Columbia more pronounced.

I was going to make a second version by using the “inverse” of the source imagery, but my Mac’s internet connection (via it’s 25ft ethernet cable) was screwed up and I had to restart the computer (in hindsight, I realized I didn’t need to reboot grrr). I did save how I wanted make version two, so I might make it this weekend…..

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Jefferson Sparks
|| 10/19/2005 || 7:03 am || Comments Off on Jefferson Sparks || ||

: rendered at 12,000 X 8,000 :

The rendering definitely falls out of line with all of my previous work…and I like it. It reminds me of two things- sparks and bacteria…. After reading this article in Salon, I wish I would have called it Jefferson Bacteria. Maybe I just might.

The interesting part of this rendering, to me, is the use of different texture perspectives. In Bryce, you have a ton of choices for different perspectives (object space, world space, parametric, etc.) and while I normally use Object Cubic, this rendering uses almost all of the different perspectives. I like the results and in the future, I’d like to mix perspectives more.

rendering details:

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Boxes of Jefferson
|| 10/17/2005 || 7:20 am || Comments Off on Boxes of Jefferson || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

This rendering took 3 tries! It’s not that I couldn’t get the boxes in the right place, but every time I tried loading a third image to the scene Bryce would crash.

The result, is my first geographically derived puzzle.

How many boxes do you see?

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Localized Self-Portrait #2
|| 10/11/2005 || 10:22 pm || Comments Off on Localized Self-Portrait #2 || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

One good rendering deserves another, right? I figured what the hell, why not make another Janus Series Self-Portrait! I’ll try not to make too many more :)

This one is slightly different than the first, in fact its quite a bit different. I started with a picture of myself that I took in my room last summer. I chose this picture of myself because 1) I like the way I look it (aka I think its a cute photo) 2) I love the blue fabric I have on my wall in my room, and this picture captures it’s the deep blue color with subtle touches of polyester luster.

Surrounding the picture of myself, lets call this the inner frame, is a delayed exposure photograph I took of a campfire in Colorado two summers ago. (You can view the original photograph here). I chose this photograph because the orange would contrast the blue in the fabric. I also chose it because of the contrast with the outer frame, a tessellated USGS aerial photograph of my house (which can be seen in the second detail below the fold). The idea, as cheesy as it sounds, is that I’m burnin up the neighborhood :-) Or as a historical corollary, my neighborhood, or at least the area around my neighborhood, was burned in the 1968 riots (which took place after Martin Luther King was assassinated) and the flames are also a fitting reminder of the history.

This rendering is also different because I chose to rotate the tessellation 45 degrees, which created an interesting checkerboard effect. I also chose to only reflect the source imagery 4 times instead of the roughly 16 reflections the last self-portrait received.

Up next- an abstract for the paper presentation I am going to give at the Association of American Geographer’s Annual Meeting in March. I’ve got a bad case of writers block tho…

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Janus Series
|| 10/10/2005 || 12:08 pm || Comments Off on Janus Series || ||

So after looking at my last two renderings, I realized they looked like the two-faced Roman God Janus. I went over to Wikipedia and looked up Janus…

this is the current entry:

In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of gates, doors, doorways, beginnings, and endings. His most apparant remnant in modern culture is his namesake, the month of January. Though he was usually depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions (Janus Geminus (twin Janus) or Bifrons), in some places he was Janus Quadrifrons (the four-faced). The Romans associated Janus with the Etruscan deity Ani.

Janus was frequently used to symbolize change and transitions such as the progression of past to future, of one condition to another, of one vision to another, and of one universe to another. Hence, Janus was worshipped at the beginnings of the harvest and planting times, as well as marriages, births and other beginnings. He was representative of the middle ground between barbarity and civilization, rural country and urban cities, and youth and adulthood.

Janus was supposed to have come from Thessaly in Greece and shared a kingdom with Camese in Latium. They had many children, including Tiberinus. Janus and his later wife, Juturna, were the parents of Fontus. Another wife was named Jana. Historically, however, he was one of the few Roman gods who had no ready made Greek counterpart, or analogous mythology.

As the sole ruler of Latium, Janus heralded the Golden Age, introducing money, laws and agriculture (making him a culture hero).

When Romulus and his men kidnapped the women of the Sabines, Janus caused a hot spring to erupt, causing the would-be attackers to flee. In honor of this, the doors to his temples were kept open during war so that he could easily intervene. The doors and gates were closed during peace.

Now what is weird, is my desire to name these recent renderings, the “Janus Series,” like the Star Series, Memory Series, Mother Earth Series, etc.

I googled “Janus Series” to see who else has used that two word phrase, and the first result (I’m feeling lucky) came with a result of…. Johannes Kepler’s The Secret of the Universe (Janus Series)

After doing a search for The Secret of the Universe Johannes Kepler scrolling down the page I find a mention of the book on, of all places, the Schiller Institute website. I didn’t even know this “institute” existed…..and it’s based here in Washington, DC!

Today is Columbus Day and it’s also my birthday– I live in a district named after him and today we are sharing the celebration of the day together. I am worried that his karma might get out of hand tho- 513 years is a long time. We’ll see!

Self-Portrait
|| 10/9/2005 || 6:31 pm || Comments Off on Self-Portrait || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

Using a picture I took of myself in the Iao Valley in Maui, Hawaii on January 6th, 2005, I tessellated the picture (1200X1200) around the edges of a 4800 X 4800 pixel canvas. This allowed for a 2400X2400 square in the center to be filled with an image of my choosing.

In the spirit of my Jefferson Mandala print being at the MOCA DC/A&M Gallery, I chose to use the same source imagery, the first derivative of the Mall Quilt.

I added one extra touch in Photoshop, which I’ve never done before, I added some black glow to the picture of myself. This caused the aerial photograph to appear just below the frame. Almost as if there is a layer of the earth just below the blue sky, the aerial photography seems to float perfectly in the center of the tessellated mosaic.

I chose the quirky picture of myself because:
I liked the angle at which I took it (mountains!),
I liked the “what you lookin’ at,” half-smile, grin
I liked the color of sky (and even the two lens blemishes)
I like the contrast of the green to blue to white tones

The result, is definitely one of my favor works yet. The process of setting up the source imagery in photoshop is probably the most exciting part of it all. I can now do large mosaics with multiple aerial & satellite images. What will come next? We shall see…

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Hello! Thanks for stopping by! My name is Nikolas Schiller. I am an American citizen currently living in New York City and working remotely to support structural change in Washington, DC.

This blog is my online repository of what I have created or found online since May of 2004. I've been on hiatus since 2018 but plan on contributing more content in the not so distant future.

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