what might a technical animator do?

ACJelly

I have a second interview for a technical animator role. I'm very excited although when I asked what technical skills they're looking for they were quite vague.

I'm not a coder, nor am I a good rigger, I can do basic skinning and rigging but not to a professional standard.  I have specialized in 3D character and games animation.

From searching around I've not found a clear answer either, some studios have described it as a rigger/animator or coder/animator while others have described as an animator who animates "technical" things (like cars, scenery etc...)

Is tech anim a generally vague job title or have I missed something? I'd really like to do well in this interview but I'm afraid that I'm not going to have enough technical know how and am going to look like fool.

Thank you.

poopipe

Anything with technical in it tends to be a bit vague - I know technical artists who do little except write engine and render code, others like myself who develop authoring pipelines for art and everything in between.

Technical animator to me means you'll need to rig, handle mocap, deal with game side animation integration and build tools to make specific animation jobs easier for the animators.