The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Philly Quilt
|| 1/11/2006 || 12:21 pm || Comments Off on Philly Quilt || ||

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

Finally I’ve gotten around to making some maps of Philadelphia. I had tried in the past, but when I downloaded the imagery I could never get the mosaic setup right. I wanted to make a large square of all of Philly to show both the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, but I’d either not have enough imagery, or I’d screw up the download, or in the end, it just ended up being too large of a mosaic to incorporate into a tessellation.

Essentially, if my desired output size is 18,000 and my tessellated source imagery ends up being 9,000 X 9,000, then I am not going to be able to show all of the city because the seams cut out some parts at the center. Also, large tessellations take a long time to import and take longer to parse through when rendering. That is why I made 5 renderings for Philly! This is the first time I’ve made so many. One of them is also a nondescript highway intersection of 95 & 676, which I might use next (not sure!). As for this map, it’s the standard hexagon quilt projection with the western side of Philly showing. I chose to set up the tessellation so that the Schuylkill river was the geographic identifier and rotated the imagery around it. The result is nice and the river makes it easy to find the seams of the tessellation. Up next is a diamond quilt projection map rotated 45 degrees and it should look nice :-) This year I am going to continue making more diamond quilt projection maps!!

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Denver Quilt #2
|| 1/9/2006 || 2:38 pm || Comments Off on Denver Quilt #2 || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Denver Quilt #2 by Nikolas R. Schiller

After looking through my archives, it appears that I never put the first Denver Quilt online! I know I have a copy of it in my iPhoto repository (I keep the final versions of my maps there so I can, at few clicks of a mouse, order prints on demand), but I am surprised that I never posted anything about it. I remember that it was a Diamond Quilt Projection because that was all that I knew how to make at the time! I also believe I made a Denver Mandala as well, so it looks like I have some searching to do in my archives and some processing as well!

I remade the Denver source imagery for this map and oddly I found that I already had two versions saved, but both were not perfect squares (as mentioned before). This version uses my favorite quilt projection and it turned out decently.

I only wish that I would have used slightly less light or post-processed the map (adjusting for contrast) to make it slightly darker. I must say that getting the lighting right is one of the hardest, but most crucial aspects to making these maps. Light is a destructive force because once the imagery has been sufficiently bleached in a scene, the post-processing can only regain so much of what was lost in tone and contrast.

Up next I have a slew of maps from Philly! I have one that finished rendering this morning that I have to process this evening. And there is also another one being rendered right now. I made 4 different tessellations of the source imagery of Philly, so I expect there to be quite a bit of variety in the end. Normally I don’t make multiple tessellations with the source imagery, and instead rely on one tessellation for each specific geographic location. There are some exceptions, but this series is sure to end up rather interesting.

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Minneapolis Quilt #2
|| 1/8/2006 || 10:47 am || Comments Off on Minneapolis Quilt #2 || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Minneapolis Quilt #2 by Nikolas R. Schiller

I haven’t touched my Minneapolis imagery in a long time and I felt another map was due. I had to remake the source imagery because when I first prepared the imagery for Minneapolis nearly a year ago I did not know about the importance of using perfect squares for tessellations. My first versions were tessellated rectangles- which do tessellate properly, but when placed into Bryce, there is a level of distortion in proportion to the amount the length is larger/smaller than the width. I think the best example of this distortion is found in the first Georgetown Quilts. Well this map is distortion free, errr, well, I didn’t add any of my own at least. The irony is that it all maps are distortions of reality :-)

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Miami Quilt #2
|| 1/5/2006 || 2:20 pm || Comments Off on Miami Quilt #2 || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Miami Quilt No. 2 by Nikolas Schiller

I am really digging the 45 degree switch up. I think I might have to add a secondary category of two seamed quilts that are rotated. The rest of quilts do not show very much difference when rotated compared to the 2 seamed quilts.

Up next will be the finalized graphic of what I would have sold to the client, but made anyways… It’s going to be the standard lenz projection but with a new style of signature –its 2K6 and its time for a signatory remix.

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Miami Quilt
|| 1/3/2006 || 1:13 pm || Comments Off on Miami Quilt || ||

: rendered at 12,000 X 8,000 :
Miami Quilt by Nikolas Schiller

Life is funny sometimes and when it rains it can pour…. So I obtain the Miami imagery on Sunday and I start making this map. Then yesterday I got a call from a former client asking if I can make them a map like I had made for them in the past… but of all places they want me to make a map of its– MIAMI! Too cool right? But alas, my swift (I do mean swift) turnaround draft map was not what they were looking for :-\ To add to the coincidence, when I was at the club last night, one of the DJs played this Bad Company (UK) tune called Miami Flashback, which has a vocal sample of my old friend Stacey K. on it!

As for this map, it is your standard 3 seam map. These are my favorite quilts because in most maps they create a beautiful Star of David in the center….simple as that. And well, ummm, I really like the colors of the water. I made two versions of the source imagery, but so far I’ve only used one (NE). I have another 2 seamed map on the docket.

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Salt Lake City Quilt
|| 12/26/2005 || 1:14 am || Comments Off on Salt Lake City Quilt || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Salt Lake City Quilt by Nikolas Schiller

Looking good :-)

I wish I would have tessellated the source imagery differently. It would have shown more of the geographic location I wanted it to- the Mormon Temple. It only shows up on the periphery..

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Houston Quilt 2
|| 12/21/2005 || 8:31 pm || Comments Off on Houston Quilt 2 || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Houston Quilt No. 2 by Nikolas Schiller

Interesting… So in my last entry I wrote on & on about lines of symmetry, and after looking at this rendering a bit more, I think some of my analysis was partially incorrect. Lemme break it down…

Okay so this map should fall in line with what I was saying comprises a 2 seam map, but what I found is another two lines of symmetry- lines that all 2 seamed maps contain is actually 4 lines of symmetry. In constructing this map I used a total of 4 infinite planes with each in groups of 2. The first two are 75 X 75 in size and at a Z angle of 5 & -5 respectively, and the second two are 75 X 75, at an angle of Z angle of 5 & -5, but rotate 90 degrees. In a 3D space this create a wedge of sorts.

To mentally picture this, imagine each pair as an X (each plane is at +-5 degrees), but instead of looking at the X from above, as you are now looking at the character on the screen, imagine that you are only looking at one side, which makes the X look more like a V. Furthermore, you are looking at the V from the side looking down into the vertex of the V, so you see two sides and at the apex is the central seam. By rotating the second pair 90 degrees, the V turns into a pyramid with 4 sides, and you are looking at the pyramid from below it’s base. Thus you get 4 different lines of symmetry for each seam. This make sense? I can take some screen shots to explain this a bit more…

With this jargon out of the way, the result is that with two grouped planes, I get 4 lines of symmetry. And it can be assumed that with 3 grouped planes, I get 6 lines of symmetry and so on. I think the most effective way to classify all the maps in the quilt project will be based of lines of symmetry (aka seams) because these can easily be identified, while the number of infinite planes (which result in the number of seams) is not as easily identifiable.

With #40 out of the way, its time to go through and classify them all……..fun!
==Update==
I ended up using the geometry as the means categorize my maps.

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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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San Francisco Memory revisited
|| 4/23/2005 || 7:46 pm || Comments Off on San Francisco Memory revisited || ||

So yesterday my sister asks me if I can get her imagery of San Fran for her school project. This afternoon I tried going to the USGS and had their web-based GIS not work properly, so I gave up attempting to acquire the imagery. Later today (like 4 hours later), I found an old CD that was laying on top of my TV and I realized that CD had the “San Francisco Memory” rendering on it. So I opened it up, and to my amazement, the spot at which the earth and the ocean meet near the center of the rendering is where the property she is working on is located. On March 5th, I created special memory….

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San Francisco Memory
|| 3/5/2005 || 9:07 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

San Francisco Memory by Nikolas Schiller

I think my sister is going to love this print. Slowly but surely, I’ve rendered images of all the locations my family is located. In the full size version of this rendering, you can actually see my sister’s apartment! I think my favorite aspect of this rendering this the way the Golden Gate Park appears to give some rectangular symmetry. Here is a Google Map of the same area:

The source image from Space Imaging was rotated so the resulting rendering has Golden Gate Bridge at both the top & bottom center. Of course the full size version allows one to see the bridge in better detail. This is my third rendering of this series.

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Nikolas Schiller is a second-class American citizen living in America's last colony, Washington, DC. This blog is my on-line repository of what I have created or found on-line since May of 2004. If you have any questions or comments, please contact: