The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

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.

View Map Detail:

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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…..

rendering details:

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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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DC Blogs-spot
|| 10/18/2005 || 7:01 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

So recently my blog was listed on a website called DC Blogs. Although, I didn’t really want to be added to the list, I don’t mind that much. After looking over the website for a bit, I noticed something a bit odd about all the blogs that were listed…. they all seemed to from Google’s website Blogspot. I didn’t realize how popular that website was until I began looking at the DC Blogs website. Of course, the scientist in me asked, “well how many blogs are listed there?” and of course, I decided to find out…

As of today, there are currently 631 blogs listed and of those, 413 are Blogspot blogs! That is a whopping 65% of all the blogs.

I also found that there were 22 Typepad blogs, 18 Livejournals, 4 AOL Journals, 3 Smorgasblogs, and the rest, a meager 171 blogs (27%) are your normal word press & moveable type dot com/net blogs.

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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?

answer & rendering details:

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Karl Rove’s Leaky Protection…
|| 10/14/2005 || 6:45 pm || Comments Off on Karl Rove’s Leaky Protection… || ||

This was handed out by Code Pink earlier today outside of the courthouse where Karl Rove was testifying on the Valerie Plame leak case. My friend who gave this to me, along with about 8 others, were dressed up as large condoms. I am not sure if the messanging was effective, but I give them kudos for being creative about the concept of leaking. It is, afterall, somewhat of a stretch, but Rove’s leak- not so much!

Related Humor Entries:

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Confluence Project meets Google Earth
|| 10/13/2005 || 8:24 am || 2 Comments Rendered || ||

After being so impressed by the kind words and excellent recap of my first confluence, I decided on a whim late Thursday night (early this morning) to respond to Joseph’s generosity by geocoding his 86 different confluences using Google Earth.

Already listed on the Confluence website was Joseph’s previous confluences, so all I had to was manually cut & paste each confluence into Google’s search bar and the program would take me to the location. This proved to be somewhat more time consuming because there is a bug in Google Earth which does not allow the ASCII code for degreeÂ° to be used when searching. This forced me to paste the coordinates, then go into the search box and delete the degree character.

After being flown to the confluence, I clicked on the icon to add a placemark and within the placemark I cut pasted the confluence URL, the date Jospeh visited, and the location’s approximate location. This way when someone clicks on the placemark, they are given the option of viewing Joseph’s pictures and remarks. With Google Earth’s embedded web browser this hyperlinking works excellently because you can see the on-the-ground photos alongside the overhead aerial & satellite imagery. This works very similar to my “E St. Risk Analysis” flash animation I made at GWU.

My favorite aspect of this little Google Earth project is the ability of this to be used for learning and pedagogical development. Essentially, I’ve wanted to make a learning tool for the program since Google Earth came out, but there hasn’t been an opportunity yet for me to do so. What I’ve created is a fun, inquiry driven, learning module for Google Earth which teaches the basics of thinking spatially about latitudes and longitudes.

Directions: Load the layer I made (link below) in Google Earth and go to the menu, click on View –> Lat/Long Grid, you can see how his travels lineup perfectly with the latitudes and longitudes on the surface of the earth. You can the go one step further by clicking on embedded Confluence URLs to see the temporal aspects of his visit and how they relate to the time when the aerial & satellite image was taken.

If you have Google Earth installed on your PC, click save target as, and download the layer “JKconfluences.kml” Then open it up in Google Earth and have fun!

I’d love feedback!

39 degrees North, 77 degrees West – My first Confluence
|| 10/12/2005 || 8:40 am || 2 Comments Rendered || ||

Earlier this month on October 1st, 2005, my colleague from the USGS, Joseph Kerski took me to my first confluence at 39 degrees North and 77 degrees West (not far from Silver Spring, MD).

This is his report:

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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: