The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Starscape Animations
|| 6/23/2006 || 12:54 pm || Comments Off on Starscape Animations || ||

Inner Harbor Fly-Around

Made in the summer of 2005 for a client, this geospatial animation is a fly around of a Lenz projection centered on a high resolution aerial photograph of the Inner Harbor in downtown Baltimore, Maryland

Fort Armistead Park Fly-Around

Created for VJs at the 8th Annual Starscape Music & Arts Festival on June 24th, 2006. This animation uses high-resolution aerial photography of the area around the location of the event and creates a synthetic fly-over similar to Google Earth.

Animations for Starscape
|| 6/18/2006 || 12:44 am || Comments Off on Animations for Starscape || ||

I got a call today from my friend Robin about helping make content for the VJs at the Starscape Music Festival in Baltimore next weekend. I told him I’d love to make some animations for the event. He used my Washington Monument Zoom during Thievery Corporation‘s set at Operation Ceasefire, so I’m excited to have opportunity to have more of my work played at another concert.Â I made one of the inner harbor of Baltimore last summer for a client, but it’s short and I’d like to give the VJs a good minute clip to use.

Salt Lake City Quilt with Clouds – Animated
|| 12/30/2005 || 6:40 pm || Comments Off on Salt Lake City Quilt with Clouds – Animated || ||

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For the last 12 hours I have been rendering my first animation using moving clouds. I didn’t modify the quilt structure from the previous rendering, but I zoomed in closer to the center.

There are 3 pieces that are animated:
1) The Clouds – which were created from an elongated sphere and textured with a pre-made cloud alogorithm. These fly north to south across the left side of the scene.
2) Infinite plane that moves 180 to the right textured with a geographic tessellation of Salt Lake City.
3) Infinite plane that moves 180 to the left textured with a geographic tessellation of Salt Lake City.

Washington Monument Zoom
|| 8/23/2005 || 8:45 am || 2 Comments Rendered || ||

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I made this animation for one of the main projects I’m working on right now, Operation Ceasefire. I’m going to make sure it ends up in the right person’s hands and hopefully it will be seen on a projection screen during the concert. I think the only real error in this rendering is that most people will be expecting to see the White House as it zooms out, but the tessellation only contains the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and some of the mall. Regardless, I think it looks pretty cool. If I had more time, I’d make a few more animations using this same imagery, but I’m not in the mood right now to do so. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, and I’m not sure if I’ll have much time to render anything for the next few days. But I guess, as I tend end my postings, we’ll see :-)

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

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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!

Baltimore Mandala Animated
|| 6/22/2005 || 12:09 am || Comments Off on Baltimore Mandala Animated || ||

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Its nice to take a good healthy spin & zoom….

This is my first animated mandala, and I am quite pleased with the results.
…I wonder what tomorrow will bring!

DC Molecule
|| 2/10/2005 || 10:00 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

I used the same source image as I used for my last rendering and mapped it as a texture on to the “star of..” series template and then I animated a fly-through…looks pretty good. So good that I included not one, but threee screen shots of the animation.

Image Links to Flash Player:

Mother Earth Animation
|| 12/4/2004 || 4:26 pm || Comments Off on Mother Earth Animation || ||

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I think this is a pretty cool animation. There are two flaws I noticed, but I don’t think they detract too much from the animation.

Namib Desert
|| 9/10/2004 || 3:52 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

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This animation shows exactly why I think the whole spherical aspect of the “Lenz Project” is interesting. Albeit very simple, I am still amazed at how beautiful our earth is. Oh yeah, if you ever go to the Namib desert watch out for diamonds in the sand! BTW, deBeers sucks— artificially inflated blood diamonds really show the one you love that you paid too much for that bling! Watch this video for more info.

Next image will be the same graphic as in the animation, but just a hell of a lot larger (10,000 by 7,500 pixels) and should be on-line in about 6 hours.

..still fasting..
|| 8/17/2004 || 9:00 am || Comments Off on ..still fasting.. || ||

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Above is a screenshot of today’s rendering– a 5 second animation of the most recent “Brussels Lenz” (see previous post). If you look closely, you can see why I’ve been so fascinated by the use of the glass sphere with embedded images. Well if you don’t want to look closely, I’ll explain it anyways- I like the way the sphere refracts the satellite images to look similar to the curveture of the earth. If you’ve ever been on top of a high mountain (one that goes above tree line) you might get what I’m talking about. Anyways, I’m not sure what graphic I’ll render next…. oddly at 30 frames per second at 720X480 size, a five second animation takes less time to make than a conventional still image….. hmmm, I think I’m sold on the idea of really large posters.

Adam kicked ass on Hardball last night. I recorded the show and put it on his campaign website. I was amazed at how Chris Matthews kept on insinuating that protestors are violent and bent on destruction. Yet Adam managed to keep his cool the entire time. Much respect!

I encoded the recording using Real Video. This was my first time using this A/V format. I was able to download the Export Plugin for Quicktime, and I am very pleased with the compression that I was able to get. However to encode the 13 minute segment of the show from DV format to Real Video format took over 3 hours! Way too long but the export plugin was able to take a 5,500 megabyte video file and compress it to 35 megabytes….that pretty impressive, albeit time consuming.

On the fasting front, this morning I ate a cayenne pepper. My friend David mentioned how the pepper is supposed to help cleanse the body by way of heat. After not eating any food for 36 hours (while drinking about 3 gallons of water) the cayenne pepper actually made my body temperature rise slightly. It was kinda cool. I am expecting a ketosis buzz sometime this afternoon. It should be interesting. And tomorrow a special friend will be coming to DC to visit me. I’m excited!

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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: