From environment to technical artist?
polycounter lvl 9
I understand both job titles probably vary a great deal from one studio to another, but what is the likely hood that one job carries well into the next?
I assumed for a long time that the technical artist does the pipeline dirty work, while the environment artists crank out the assets, but Polycount has pretty much thrown that out the window over the time I've spent here. It seems like every studio asks something different, so I'm at a bit of a loss here. I've spent years putting my own work into various engines, so I'm no stranger to learning pipelines, but as far as writing my own tools? Nope. Programming isn't really my forte, but I definitely feel I could learn to fill the role.
Of course, I'm bringing this all up because I've always considered myself an environment artist, but I keep seeing far more positions for technical artists at the studios I would like to work at.
Any input from you guys is appreciated!
I assumed for a long time that the technical artist does the pipeline dirty work, while the environment artists crank out the assets, but Polycount has pretty much thrown that out the window over the time I've spent here. It seems like every studio asks something different, so I'm at a bit of a loss here. I've spent years putting my own work into various engines, so I'm no stranger to learning pipelines, but as far as writing my own tools? Nope. Programming isn't really my forte, but I definitely feel I could learn to fill the role.
Of course, I'm bringing this all up because I've always considered myself an environment artist, but I keep seeing far more positions for technical artists at the studios I would like to work at.
Any input from you guys is appreciated!
Replies
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=74567
Also check out tech-artists.org. If your main app is 3ds Max, check out this and if you use Maya check out Kevin Mannens DVD's on Gnomon. Great links for getting started with scripting in your respective programs.
Also watch this playlist. Its interviews with actual technical artists and what they do, how they got started, what a tech artist needs etc.
But the best tech artists I've personally worked with understand all kinds of pipelines and workflows, and script/program in their spare time, while retaining a solid foundation in art theory.
MIT Lectures : http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrica...ideo-lectures/
Some free online books are here: http://openbookproject.net/
A PDF version of one of them here: http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/
Hmm... it looks like the openbookproject link is currently having problems. It might just be temporarily down/slow.
Personally I found learning programming through these Stanford lectures to be more entertaining though the language that is used in the class is Java not Python...
The lectures are here, course materials here, free pre-press version of the textbook here, and the other textbook here, at the course website, if you are interested.
whys this Patrick?
Nice links Ben. been watching those MIT python lectures, pretty good for object oriented stuff.
The one thing that I can tell you that remains consistent about being a tech artist in a company is flexibility. You must be willing to learn new things at the drop of a hat and enjoy solving problems instead of seeing them as road blocks.
Yes you need to be an artist and you need to understand coding but when I look for TD's to hire I want to know that they love solving problems, if they love doing that then it will not mater if they don't know HLSL shaders as they will soon learn it if it helps solve the problem at hand.
I don't see game, film, broadcast productions. What I see are challenges and I find it fun to work on a production that I know very little about. Some of my work has been used for the revisualization and assembly of satellites in massive clean rooms. This had nothing to do with what I had worked on to date and required a whole new vocabulary but that was the fun of it.
If you don't have this sort of mind set I would suggest that TD work might not be what you want.
vfx is a lot like tech art and you need to be willing to tinker, play around, problem solve than following a tutorial. That or sit next to a vfx artist :P
It seemed whenever an interview got to the "things every TA should know" they would roll off a (very) unfamiliar list of advance maths and programming languages. It was very overwhelming! But I don't plan on giving up until I've had a chance to get down and dirty with the stuff.
Then perhaps I've been a TA longer than an environment artist! I spent years working on mods, often learning and doing the jobs no one else on the team wanted or knew how to do. Problem solving in video game development was my bread and butter before I decided to buckle down and focus on my environment art.
As I said earlier, I was a little overwhelmed earlier, but after a supportive thread like this, I can't not try! Thanks guys.
I joined Rockstar as a character artist but was script a lot of the character stuff purely because of the volume of assets that we were dealing with. I think it started with tools to set up the shaders and check that things were named correctly. A few years later I was lead character tech artist (a title created to give recognition to the work I was doing). I think I had maybe 4 or 5 characters that ended up in GTA4 (the Taxidrivers and Firemen are the only ones I can think of), but I rigged Niko and about 75% of the story characters, and probably 30% of the ambient population.
Again, my scripts were solely to help me and the character guys deal with the volume of characters - skeleton replacement tools that preserved skinning, facial setup tools, asset validation tools, that sort of thing.
After GTA4 shipped my role broadened to deal with many more aspects of the games we work on - props, vehicles, shaders. Rockstar gave me room to grow into my own and write a job around myself (they are incredibly supportive in that way).
I spend about 50% of my time now talking and looking at wider issues, making sure that artists have the tools they need to speed up their workflow, and getting Cool-Shit-To-Work.
The number one skill for a tech artist to have in my mind is to be able to understand peoples needs.
dont let the math bog you down. If you want, I can send some books that have helped me currently. Also khan academy. that thing is a treasure mine by itself
It's true that there is a lot to learn when you first get started but I think it gets easier as you move along, or at least you have a larger base of knowledge to pull from to solve problems. I bet a TA is always learning new and challenging things to solve problems which is one of the things that attracts me to the position so much.
Python is probably one of the easiest programming languages to learn and shouldn't pose any major problems. Stick to Python, take the time to learn it well, and see if you can start doing things with it. Once you know Python well enough you can check out the Python bindings/libraries for Maya, Max, Modo, and Blender. There are some small differences between Python 2 and 3. I'd recommend learning Python 2 when you start out since I think most people are still using it, and will be for a long time to come to support legacy code.
The interesting thing about programming is that once you learn one language it's fairly easy to learn another. It's not really the language that poses difficulty but like haiddasalami said it's the logic behind the programs that's the hard part.
Math has been the most difficult thing for me to learn as well. I also recommend Khan Academy there are some other resources available for linear algebra out there as well such as these:
Khan Academy: http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy#g/c/FD0EB975BA0CC1E0
MIT: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=e7ddd91010bc51f8
NJ Wildberger: http://www.youtube.com/user/njwildberger#g/c/01A21B9E302D50C1
@haiddasalami:
I'm also interested in which books you are studying, if you don't mind sharing. Thus far I haven't gotten any books on math yet.
I picked up two books from the library so far.
1. [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Mathematics-Games-Interactive-Applications/dp/155860863X"]Essential Mathematics for Games by James Verth and Lars Bishop[/ame]
This book gets in pretty deep real fast. First 4 chapters are on real numbers, vectors, matrices, (currently here as I constantly go back to re-read/check stuff on khan academy and got this recently from the library) quarternions, affine transformations etc. Then some are on rendering (diffuse lighting, transformation matrices etc) and theres stuff on collision detection etc.
2. [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Primer-Graphics-Development-Wordware-Library/dp/1556229119/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312506435&sr=1-1"]3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development.[/ame]
Much easier for someone to read this than the other book especially if you havent taken math in quite a while.
If you have a library near you, check if they have these.
Also if you go with python, grab Learning python by Mark Lutz. Best reference ever. 4th edition covers python 3.0 and 3rd covers 2.6 I believe which Maya supports and so does the blur python.
Also regarding all this math, remember you have programmers who have studied linear algebra, calc etc so can always rely on them to pull you out of a tough situation.
Yeah in a team there's always going to be awesome people to get help from, though in the case of math I'd like to really be able to do it on my own since so many of the tools I plan on making atm will need to deal with vector calculations.
There's your tool coder TA, who's really mostly a programmer who also happens to know how 3ds Max or Maya work.
There's your SFX TA who knows the in and outs of creating SFX, particle effects, controlling lights and shaders (via scripts sometimes) and makes sure it all works smoothly in the engine.
There's your rigging TA who knows all about bones, animation, expressions, etc.
There's your pipeline TA - who make sure all the files end up the right way from one production step to the other, creates tools to make automated tasks run smooth and implements QA along the way. And if things go wrong at some stage in the pipe he can track down the problem and fix it.
Then there's the generalist TA who knows a bit of everything and can bring it all together to bridge the gaps between departments and disciplines.
There's probably more roles, but these are the most common ones I encounter. You might want to ask yourself which of these directions appeal most to you and then focus on relevant skills. Because there's just no way to excel at all of it. And then when looking for a job, target the studios which need TA's of your specialization.
http://linear.ups.edu/download.html
http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html/
http://www.mecmath.net/
The better you can communicate with them, the better you know what the problem is that you have to solve.
Scripting skills are a must for tech artist. Maxscript, python, mel, ...
C++ can be helpful if you need to program a plugin or exporter. But most of the time you can do it with scripting.
C# is great for developing tools.
Shader development is mostly the task for technical artist. So some math skills (vectors, matrices, ...) is useful for that.
And so much more ...
Conlusion = Have a good foundation so you can educate yourself to solve the problems
ayyup - most important TA skill: research and learn stuff on your own and use this knowledge to solve problems.