Your homepage (if you have one): www.schloerb.com

Your country: Germany

Softwares used by you: 3ds max, Adobe Premiere, Corel Graphics Suite, Autodesk Animator Pro (from 1991 and still needed quite often!)  and almost  everything else from PageMaker to Scala InfoChannel Designer, if needed for a particular job.

Current hardware(CPU, RAM, video card): Dual Athlon XP 1600+, 1024 MB RAM, Asus V6600 GeForce 256  (and 4 additional "render slaves" based on Pentium  II and III systems).

How did you get into CG and when? : This must have started in 1990, when I first got in touch with 3DS 1.0 for DOS. I was instantly fascinated by this technology, as it offered so many more opportunities than the Desktop Publishing stuff I had done until then. In 1995 I won a 2nd prize at a Star Trek video contest of a national TV station. Lacking the necessary filming and video equipment, I sent in this 8-minutes-animated-short  http://www.schloerb.com/streams/trek95.wmv and received very positive feedback. Through this I also got to know some people who were already in the CG business back then, such as Tobias Richter (www.thelightworks.com), and until today I'm very grateful that those guys encouraged me to move on and NOT listen to others who thought I should rather drop this hobby and  eventually concentrate on school. :)

Does art play a role in your job? :  Yes, always - even if a particular client doesn't expect or maybe even can't estimate art. But then again my definition of art is quite basic: if something is "round" and conclusive in itself, then it is already art for me. So also "plain" photorealism can be art, if the composition is right and maybe even a message or just an emotion lies beneath.

What other form of art do you beside CG?  : I once _DID_ also draw caricatures for local newspapers and was quite well-known for this once in my region. I've been already a "political caricaturist" (that is a"serious" cartoonist) when I was 16. But I literally unlearned it, the more I concentrated on digital art. Meanwhile I've become so nerdish, that I can't even write manually very well. :)