The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Prague Quilt
|| 8/20/2005 || 2:58 am || Comments Off on Prague Quilt || ||

: rendered at 15,000 X 10,000 :

I haven’t made a rendering of Europe like this one before. As of late, I’ve been using most aerial photography from the USGS and satellite imagery from NASA. This imagery I found by scouring someone’s extensive digital map collection and randomly discovered some high-resolution imagery of Prague, Czech Republic.

The most striking feature of this map is the way the Danube bends and reflects. It really gives more definition to the lines of symmetry. Generally, when there is some of specific geographic identifier within the prepared imagery, the final product tends to be slightly more intricate. This is definitely the case with Prague. Up next, the letter N or the letter Z, it all depends on your perspective.

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

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!

Buena Park Mandala
|| 8/15/2005 || 7:22 am || Comments Off on Buena Park Mandala || ||

: rendered at 12,000 X 12,000 :
Buena Park Quilt by Nikolas Schiller

I really don’t dig how this one turned out. It’s too dark for my taste and you can’t really see much detail in the final product. I do like the other Buena Park renderings much better.

I need to get some new imagery because I’m not very happy with what has been rendered recently. I think it boils down to needing a new template that reflects my current emotions a bit more. And well, it’s quite ironic that the Buena Park imagery does has a roller coaster inside of it :-) But really, I want to start using some more human figures and new perspectives. I like that…new perspectives on the world, because, after all, that is what I’m creating isn’t it?

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Boston Mandala
|| 8/14/2005 || 11:23 pm || Comments Off on Boston Mandala || ||

: rendered at 15,000 X 10,000 :

This rendering differs from the rest of the Mandala Project because I rendered it in 3:2 aspect ratio instead of the regular square. I really like the way the high number of reflections create an optical illusion of a circle when the rendering is a series of reflected squares. Reminds me of that Jung quote I found…

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Boston Quilt
|| 8/13/2005 || 8:49 pm || Comments Off on Boston Quilt || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

I’m digging these Boston renderings too much! I am very happy with how it turned out and I am looking forward to the next Boston rendering. Should I throw it into a Lenz? I guess we’ll see…. Nonetheless, this probably one of my favorite renderings from the Quilt Project yet. Up next, of course, a Boston Mandala.

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Minneapolis Sunrise
|| 8/12/2005 || 8:28 pm || Comments Off on Minneapolis Sunrise || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

Eh, after 23 hours of processing time, I wish this rendering turned out better. It looks cool, I mean after 3 hours of trying to move around the infinite planes so they’d look right before I set the scene to render, I still am not as happy as I should be with this rendering. I think it boils down to the source imagery itself… I mean, I’ve been really digging the recent Boston imagery, with its acquired/found colorful nature, and this imagery just doesn’t look as cool as what I’ve been making as of late.

Granted the Minneapolis Convention center looks cool the way it reflects, but I guess this rendering simply lacks the variations of color I desire. I could always manipulate the imagery in photoshop a bit more, and maybe I just might start doing this, but I sincerely like the concept of not modifying the colors of the imagery before rendering. By not doing so I can always modify the final product, yet the final product can be influenced by the coloration I do ahead of time…. I’ve been considering doing something similar using black & white imagery, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet….soon…

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Boston Volcano
|| 8/11/2005 || 7:55 am || Comments Off on Boston Volcano || ||

: rendered at 15,000 X 10,000 :

This is my first rendering of “colorful” Boston. I obtained the “colorful” imagery from MassGIS and I really like the way the rendering turned out. I use the word “colorful” to denote how MassGIS has put together a bunch of different imagery, taken at different a bunch of different times, and made a patchwork mosaic out of it. The different colors represent a series of factors like what time of day the photograph was taken, the angle at which the overhead device took the picture, and even season in which the photograph was taken. Regardless, this patchwork approach looks great!

I used the same template as the Mall Mountain but I changed the angle to about 40 degrees to give an interesting sense of depth to the rendering. Yet, this graphic doesn’t look much like a volcano, more like a Greatful Dead tye-dye shirt! But I think I’ll be able to replicate this again using different imagery to make some interesting prints :-)

When I was riding my bike home from work today I came up with the idea of delving into some other geographic mediums. Instead of aerial & satellite imagery, why not use a topographic map? I bet the contour lines will make the rendering all more intricate! I don’t have anything in the render pipeline at the moment, but I’m going to snag an actual map tomorrow to see what I can come up with.

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Mall Mountain
|| 8/9/2005 || 8:21 am || Comments Off on 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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White House Sunset
|| 8/2/2005 || 5:12 pm || Comments Off on 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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Georgetown Quilt #2
|| 7/31/2005 || 7:36 pm || Comments Off on 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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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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