Quoting from the article:

"A significant part of the problem was figuring out exactly what distortion Escher had used to blow up the centre of the picture; firstly because we wanted to "undistort" the picture in order to be able to copy the townscape, and secondly so that we could transform our final photograph into something that looked like Escher's print."

...

"Our eventual solution was to take a number of separate shots, zooming in on distinct parts of the model, and glue them together as a mosaic panorama. The image above was constructed in this way from 16 images. The final Escher transformation was implemented in a custom C program that I hacked together."

Wasn’t there a windows 98 (?) screensaver that did the magnifying effect like that?

You're probably thinking of this:

https://youtu.be/Vzq744X4dpw?t=560

TL;DW: It's a video showing the different Windows ME screensavers. The screensaver with magnifying effect seems to be called "Science", and starts at 9:20 (timestamp in the link).

I don't know if it also existed in Windows 98, I didn't search that much after finding that video.

Yes, that was it!

(2002)

It would be lovely if he matched lighting for the photo.

i think their other linked example of "Belvedere" is far more impressive because it's building an 'impossible object' out of lego rather than making a normal object and distorting it with photography after the fact

https://www.andrewlipson.com/escher/belvedere.html

One of my favourite LEGO MOCs ("My Own Creation" although this one isn't my creation) I've seen has been Iggy Pop and Tom Waits from the movie Coffee and Cigarettes:

https://bricknerd.com/home/cigarettes-and-coffee-man-thats-a...

https://singersincinema.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

There's some plans out there for fantastically detailed models with thousands of pieces, for instance The Sulaco from the movie Aliens: https://www.reddit.com/r/LV426/comments/vs6b1x/as_promisedth... (that one is definitely a lottery-win purchase!)

I feel like a moron, but I don't understand this. Is the left picture on the top supposed to be a photograph the lego set documented in the pictures at the end? That doesn't seem plausible. He doesn't really seem to explain "it", and I'm confused by the use of the word "rendering"

The picture at the top on the right is an etching by Escher. Lipson and Shiu computed what the distortion was on the image, then undistorted the image to create a "clean" picture of a village. They then built the village in Lego, photographed it, and applied the computed distortion to that photograph to create the image at the top left.

The pictures throughout the rest of the post document what they did, and what the model looked like from other angles. You may think it's implausible, but I can assure you that it's all true, and that's why it's impressive.

As to the use of "rendering" I'm assuming you mean this:

> I wondered for some time whether it would be possible to produce a plausible rendering of any of his pictures in LEGO bricks.

Basically that's just asking if they can produce a duplicate of the Escher image by photographing a Lego model and applying a distortion.

Which they did.

Thanks. But why is there no un-distorted photo of the lego set from the right perspective? That would be the most interesting thing IMO

He built a Lego model that from the right position, and with a fisheye/warp effect, would create a picture that looks like the famous painting.

Because of the “right position” any picture from any other angle shows all the cheating.

I'm right there with you. Thought that the lego build would replicate the warp effect without need for photographic trickery. Was disappointed.

I think it's a bit underwhelming, yes

Super curious what the distortion was! Unfortunately no GitHub link

Your comment made me go and check ... this project pre-dates the implementation of git, which was in 2005.