I am sitting here in my new favorite café/restaurant in Berlin, the Rebellion des Zimtsterns¹ and wait for the dish of the day. I really need a break from the inconvenient truth I have learned a few minutes ago. If you read on there’s also a short tutorial on a possible wire removal workflow. Skip it, if you already know it.

EDIT: Of course I couldn’t finish this lengthy post in one lunch break so I posted it the next morning.
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1. translates to The Rebellion of the Cinnamon Star [back]

Somehow I’ve all made it through many hours of very interesting presentations — still my spirits weakened: Four hours of sleep a day just isn’t enough for conventions like the FMX where one should be as sharply focused as a Pong-player in order not to miss anything: Today it was everything about games mostly.

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Today I was eager for a new Pixar poster. Who would’ve thought that I spent nearly one and half hour talking with the guys and gals from Pixar?

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Recruiting day for me! Yesterday I was too tired and lacked of motivation getting some of my demo reels to the important representatives of Some Great Company. And I even shook hands with one of the people who got me into VFX at all.

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I am more of a satisfyzer (yes, just I made that word up) than a maximizer but I am not up for any compromises when it comes to t-shirts: If I have an idea about a certain print I want then I won’t settle for anything less than exactly that. Yes, I was looking for that perfect, one and only DeLorean-logo shirt!

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Call me flip-floppy but today I like Steam better than the day before. Because it works again and likes to display my custom models. Like the one out of three airplanes I modeled for S&P Simulations some months ago.

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Some of you might have seen me two days ago roaming around the endless corridors of the campus: Black shirt, shorts, worn flip-flops and a large black camera on a tripod on my shoulder. But why would I take pictures of the boring campus in medium format? Well… why not?

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Sometimes a scanned negative looks just like the one in the picture: Although there’s an area, like the snow, that should have a coherent tone, it’s sometimes darker and sometimes brighter - there’s even vignetting on the right side. In the darkroom this means to dodge and burn until you get away with it but this takes usually a lot of time. But in Photoshop everything’s a little easier.

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I am working on another project for BigBoy Productions and I needed a realistic gold texture with proper reflections but which doesn’t take eons to render. Years ago I was very close to photorealistic gold but unfortunately I forgot a big deal about it. After playing around for days I finally came up with a good solution which I will present you in this tutorial.

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