The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Lincoln Nebraska Quilt
|| 4/3/2006 || 8:29 am || Comments Off on Lincoln Nebraska Quilt || ||

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

Today’s map is one of my first for the state of Nebraska.

View the Google Map of downtown Lincoln, Nebraska

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Chicago Quilt
|| 2/8/2006 || 9:04 am || Comments Off on Chicago Quilt || ||

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

So I’ve finally got around to making some maps of Chicago. I’ve had this imagery sitting on my computer for almost a year now, but I just never got around to tessellating it. I chose this location of downtown Chicago (view google map) because it is where the AAG’s Annual Meeting is going to take place next month.

Ideally, I’d like to have one of these printed out and maybe given away in a raffle similar to last year. Anyways, I am making a few different maps of Chicago. I have #2 finished rendering and #3 is in the pipeline. Tonight I will prepare both of them for tomorrow. I think it might be a good idea to snag some other imagery of Chicago to make my coverage of the city slightly better.

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Washington Monument Quilt
|| 1/31/2006 || 8:31 am || Comments Off on Washington Monument Quilt || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

I think I am going to start a special category dedicated to only monuments. I have multiple renderings now of the Saint Louis Arch, the Lincoln Memorial, and now the Washington Monument…. I also have schools as well to add. hmmmmm.

This map features imagery of the Washington Monument taken in 2003 and plotted on the Hexagon Quilt Projection.

This map was my featured Monthly Map for August 2009

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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!!

: detail :

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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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Lincoln Memorial Quilt
|| 12/18/2005 || 2:02 pm || Comments Off on Lincoln Memorial Quilt || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

This is the first rendering I’ve made using the Lincoln Memorial as the subject. When creating the source imagery I took a different approach to setting up the geographic tessellation. I first rotated imagery 45 degrees and from that I cut out the Lincoln Memorial. I paid careful attention so that the refelection pool created a central X in the imagery. While the 6 seamed quilt template is not new, this method of source imagery creation is, and I am very happy with the result and will probably employ this method again in the future.

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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: