For those of you that may remember, back in the days, our slogan used to be 'We tear 'em up, we wear 'em down, for you to fly..'. Dirt, grime, weather, wear and tear was what we 'did'. In a clean aircraft dominated repaint world, we had to differentiate ourselves, right of the bat. So we did exactly that.

When we made the transition to and started focusing on (Ultra) High Definition Textures, not too long after, we found a new way to do things 'a little different' than the rest. For some reason we ditched the wear and tear and focused on clean(er), but High Definition Textures instead.

Gone were the days that I -tediously- spend hours scratching off paint, dual brushing myself through panel lines, grooves and rivets. No more nitpicking ordeals, just straight up, back to the basic 'painting'. When you think of it, in some ways it was a necessity; By going HD, we added hundreds of hours of development time. We went from 50MB Normal Definition paintkits, to 2GB UHDT kits and all those extra bytes really meant extra time, lots of it and we had  compensate, somehow..

Lately -while working on the NGX-  we stumbled upon a 'problem': We couldn't regulate the level of gloss any longer, which meant that we lost a lot of detail from the glossy effect. Even on UHDT it meant our textures were coming out somewhat bland. Flavourless one could even say..

So what now?

The answer was easy. Where my Intuos tablet was getting used to being a place holder for my Wacom mouse, it was time to take out the trusty 1024 pressure point airbush grip pen again. It was time to go back to our roots: Roughing up paint, piercing through rivets, adding dirt, dust, oil, dents, scratches and grease. One pixel at a time.

Within minutes I found myself setting (or is it messing?) up pressure points, finding the sweet spot on the angle slider, combining tip shapes, dual colour and brushes, textures, spacings and all that other good stuff that puts the Artist in Texture Artist. Like nothing ever changed, the minutes became hours, the hours became days and the past couple of weeks I was back to doing what I like doing best: Textures in the purest form of the word.

In some ways, the NGX came right in time to get (re-)acquainted with our old 'motto'. As our 3D modelers are setting up Coolsky to go 'Beta' on the DC9, I am ready to rough this old 'gal' up like it's going out of style (which she really is, going out of style). I get to chip of paint from the corners of bolts and screws, scratch it of from panels or add it a little too thick where the tech guy that did some maintenance was a little to enthusiastic with his bucket of blue paint. I get to play with adding 'texture' to the 'Initial Cruise Segment EPR Card', making sure it reflects differently than the surrounding panel area it is glued on, making sure the paper itself has a different texture than the metal. All hand painted so we can match the diffuse, specular and bump map seamlessly.  In the past year, I may have glanced at the DC-9 project as big hurdle once in a while, but now I can (happily) say:

'She's right up my alley'.

The first couple of years it was just me and the other texture guys. We did our thing, opened Photoshop every day and bragged about who had the better skills. Nicknames were being thrown at each other (guess who Captain Raster-Ize and Captain Merge-A-Lot are) but they usually meant no harm. If anything, they brightened up the day. We were the Masters of the Universe, ruling the world with smart objects, masks, dual brushes and layer styles. Could there be a better profession than being a Texture Artist? Was there a better program than Photoshop? What was more fun than brushing your way through the day?

Nothing. Right?

Wrong.

The time ; A year ago. The gate to our Photoshopped Fortress opened and in came the first couple 3D Artists. A new breed of people entered our domain. For the first time I looked at my work, often tediously detailed and crafted with much love and care and compared it to theirs and for the first time I saw the limitations of working on a flat, 2D canvas creating flat, 2D artistry. Did theirs look cooler? Did that extra dimension really added 'that extra dimension?' I knew the answer, but choose not to think about it. In the mean time, Nicolas -my fellow Lead Designer and Texture Artist in crime- made the switch and gradually started subbing Adobe's Photoshop for Autodesk's 3dsMax and is now in charge of the 3D Artists, where as I 'still get to play' with the Texture Artists.

All went well, the feeling gradually disappeared. In the end, it was 'us' -Texture Artists- pimping up 'their' 3D models. They needed us. They needed us badly. Or at least, that's what I said to myself. I was comfortably back on my Photoshop high horse, looking down, raining havoc in the form of beautiful textures on the footsoldiers I called 3D Artists. We'd Gaussian Blurr the hell out of Chuck Norris and still had time to rasterize The Rock in the mean time. 3D had nothing on Textures. Nothing. Textures still were the highest form of creativity.

Right?

Wrong.

The time ; Not too long ago.  We decided to bring back some life into our YouTube channel, which sole existence seemed to revolve around an oh so badly manufactured three year old Windows Movie Maker made, with an even worse aspect ratio E-Jet clip. We hired an After Effects wizard to do our intro and outro and at the same time, in came two new guys. Video Editors. The discussion -fumed by our two already inhouse Vegas experts Snorri and Juan- lighted up and my Photoshop stronghold started to tremble again.

I opened up Vegas to check out what the fuzz was all about and soon got 'the (motion) picture'. Things were moving a long a time line,  no longer was the canvas a stationary, flat and 2d plane. A story could be told. Music and sound could be mixed, effects, transitions, colour correction, layers, blends. All that good stuff.

It was like Photoshop... but... better...

I sometimes envy the guys that get to work with 3 dimension, I envy the guys that get to work with moving footage, sound and music, but in the end it are our our bump and specular maps that you see shine, pop and glow on the models in our videos.

Right?