Growing & educating myself as a technical artist. Can you help me?

mitroi

Hello Polycount people!

I'm looking for good places where I could develop and grow my technical art skills.

As a brief backstory, I am new to this role, around a year since I've professionally taken a tech artist role. I've been an environment artist for the past 6 years working mainly in the gaming industry. I have a background in programming - I always thought I'd become a programmer since it's very natural to me, however at one point I went with environment art because I was lacking the pleasure of working on visual stuff.

However, around 2 years ago while I was working for a video game company, people around the office realized I had a lot more technical skills than the usual 3D Artist, and so they asked me how I'd feel if I would transition into Tech Art (of which I did not know anything about, but upon hearing how it basically is a middle-ground between an artist & a programmer, I fell in love with the idea of it). Now I'm working for a different company, and I've been brought here specifically as a Technical Artist.

Everything's good so far, don't get me wrong. However, I'm very much a self-learning person, and I'd like to extend my knowledge on this expertise far more than I can within the office hours. The problem is that educational content on this expertise is very scarce and broad, at least when you compare it with learning modeling or anything art-exclusive discipline.

I want to reach out to you for help on this mission. I'm still very new to this role, as I mentioned, and I'd like to learn more about all the possibilities within this discipline, and get myself an idea about what exactly I'd like to specialize in.

I'm looking for anything paid courses, personal mentoring, basically whatever I can get my hands on and invest time, effort, and money for it.

I would greatly appreciate any kind of help and/or guide on this. Thank you very much

Benjammin

Interesting, we're in similar boats I'm in a more informal technical art role currently, but as you've noted it can mean a lot of different things. In my case, its a kind of problem solver role, where I can find better solutions for certain tasks - which has mostly meant incorporating Houdini into our pipeline

Its been a lot of Houdini (I have seen the light, and it is procedural), unreal blueprinting and materials, and picking the brains of programmers to understand some of the wizardry involved.

mitroi

@Benjammin I'm currently doing a lot of R&D for the company I'm working for. That too basically involves how the team can improve and optimize pipelines through Houdini. Prototype something worth-while using proceduralism, and then have the Leader pitch that to the programmer's departments and have them actually build that stuff for the engine.

Now I'd like to know more about what kind of projects I could work on to develop these skills, because as you said, tech art can mean so many things that it's pretty difficult to point to something specific. Not to mention that the tasks I get as a Tech Artist are things I would've never thought of myself because they're just so specific and unique to someone or something that's happening in the company.

So far I enjoy building tools for traditional artist the most, however I don't really know what these tools should be unless there's an artist asking me for it

Benjammin

@mitroi
In my case, a lot of it was initiated by me. The company gave me the chance to explore houdini and find some solutions to certain grueling tasks that I and other 3D artists would  have to do otherwise. So I suppose it helps that I am 'in the trenches' and exposed directly to the kinds of work where houdini tools would be helpful. I think the most successful thing has been a HDE for Maya that lets me fracture and generate destruction for various meshes - It turned a task that would take 15-20 mins into less than 5.
Maybe reach out to artists and pick their brains in a general sense about what parts of their workflow could be be streamlined. 

sacboi

mitroi said:

So far I enjoy building tools for traditional artist the most, however I don't really know what these tools should be unless there's an artist asking me for it

I think, that you should know how to preempt a need before an artist actually identifies one.

Alex_J

dunno if this is helpful or not, but the absolute biggest productivity killer for me is having to locate shit. Like maybe you open some program that you just use every once and awhile, and you know what you want to do but you got to spend 2 minutes trying to remember where the tool is. Any time you can just text search a name and the search is smart enough to pick up on categories and maybe even synonyms (unreal is great at this), that just makes life so much easier. It's really a cut against creativity if you have to go search your mental RAM to remember physical location of tool - the computer should remember where things are, not the artist.

also any time you have a tool that does a visual thing but the input is like... analog I guess you might say? That's no good. For instance if you have to define a curve by entering numbers, and then you have to remember what In Tanget and all this shit means, and you don't get immediate visual feedback... that turns a 30 second thing into five minutes. That's where having a curve graph that you click to make points and drag to make the curve is needed. Most tools these days are like this but there is still odds and ends where it's just a chore to deal with it.

Basically anything that can lessen the steps to go from thought to pixels representing the thought, the better. Searching memory for tool locations, and having to translate from lizard brain thought to 21st century computer man is a time and energy expense.

just tossing it out there in case it inspires any tool you might be able to create.

poopipe

I tend to look at this at a slightly higher level than most because my job is to think years ahead, not months but here's some thoughts. 

Saving an artist a few clicks doesn't generally make a tangible difference to whether your project ships on time or how good it looks.
What actually makes a difference is reducing iteration time (DCC to engine and back) , avoiding destructive workflows and making sure people can find things (now, and in 5 years). 

It is far better in the long run to provide tools that flag errors than it is to provide a tool that fixes them automatically.
This is a 'teach a man to fish' scenario. If you build something that allows people to get away with poor working practices they'll continue with the poor working practices. 

Oh - and never let anyone name anything manually. Whatever naming convention you employ becomes worthless the moment someone exports asset01_nromals.png

CrazyBlueBerry5454

@mitroi Love hearing your passion & enthusiasm for developing your technical art skills! Your journey from environment artist to technical artist is quite inspiring. 😊

Considering you're a self-learner, you might want to explore online platforms that cater technical art skills. Don't forget to check out YouTube as well, where you can find some great tutorials.

Since you're looking for personal mentoring, you might want to consider reaching out to professionals in the field through LinkedIn or Discord. Many industry experts are open to sharing knowledge and providing guidance to those eager to learn.

And as a quick tip, you might find some valuable insights in this show where the Art Director of Singularity 6 (Palia) shares hiring tips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svH-9t2Osow. Hope this helps light your path to mastering technical art! 💡

Larry

poopipe said:

It is far better in the long run to provide tools that flag errors than it is to provide a tool that fixes them automatically.
This is a 'teach a man to fish' scenario. If you build something that allows people to get away with poor working practices they'll continue with the poor working practices. 

Oh - and never let anyone name anything manually. Whatever naming convention you employ becomes worthless the moment someone exports asset01_nromals.png

This. I've picked up automation tools for creating blueprints, naming conventions and organization, and it has saved A LOT of headaches for us. Then my company decided to start selling it for lots of money. Here is the initial tool, it's been upgraded a lot since.Now it even has auto complete from an excel file, as well as X buttons to close stuff!