Why am I seeing so many Technical Artist jobs that want python / animation pipeline scripting?

yusefkerr

Over the past two years or so, I've seen an increasing proportion of Technical Artist roles that include something in the skills requirements about Python/Tooling. Can anyone give me some practical examples of what this is for?

For example, a job might be advertised as "Unreal Technical Artist", but include "Maya" as a key skill, and "Python Pipeline Tooling" as a desirable skill. The general sense I get is that this will be for a large studio that's handling 1000's of assets, and they want to automate an export process.

This seems really niche though. Is there anyone out there who's had to do something like this, i.e. using python to get assets from Maya to Unreal? And what did you have to do that wasn't natively supported?

pior

Well ... a batch exporter put together in Python is pretty much exactly the kind of stuff that Tech Art would be expected to deliver, on projects of any size. If anything it would be surprising for this kind of skill to *not* be part of the requirements of a techart job posting.

I feel like the misunderstanding might just be coming from the term "Tech Artist", who could mean "a technically minded artist" to some, while to others it actually means "someone with a good understanding of the work done by the art team, providing them with any pipeline-related tool needed for their job". "Techart-ist" rather than "Tech-artist", if you will.

poopipe

Go look in the coding and scripting bit  ( https://polycount.com/categories/coding-scripting-shader-writing )  for an idea of the sort of things TAs deal with  - I'm going to assume you're fairly new and I think you're lacking a little context. 

It's difficult to give a practical example because what you're asking for an example of is a tiny, tiny part of a much bigger system of tools and processes. 

If we're just talking about getting content from DCC to engine then in principle you don't need to build any tools if you define a robust set of processes and you can be confident that everybody will precisely follow your processes every single time they do something. 

In practice though, you cannot be confident that anyone will ever follow the processes correctly and that you will spend an enormous amount of time finding and fixing resources that someone has put in the wrong place or named wrong. 

Without modification Unreal/Maya etc. do not know about your processes. they cant enforce naming conventions, export locations, source control usage etc. so you need tools to handle that stuff 

Eric Chadwick

Also this fwiw 
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Technical_Art

yusefkerr

Thanks for the answers above, this is really helpful and probably explains why I've not had much success applying for Technical Art roles.

I actually have around 10 years experience with Unreal/Unity, but I've mainly worked as a freelancer on small projects where there's been a couple of programmers and a couple of artists, and naming conventions, folder structure, and basic version control with Git have been sufficient.  My background is in visual art, and (focussing on Unreal) my skillset is basically 3D modelling, texturing, animation in Maya/Max/Zbrush, Niagara VFX, Materials, Animation Blueprints, and Blueprints/C++ for doing basic implementation of animation, gameplay, and some multiplayer framework stuff.

Unreal-based things that are still on my learning list include ProcGenContent framework, GeometryScript, and ScriptableTools. Other things that I can't do at the moment include anything on the HLSL side of shaders, and Python/pipeline tools. I guess it's a case of trying to join a large studio and seeing what their processes are, but it feels very chicken/egg.

I thought that Technical Art described my skillset, but what would be a more suitable job title to search for? The only thing I can think of would be something like "Unreal Generalist". Alternatively, I suppose I would try to specialise as something like "VFX Artist", but that feels like cutting out a lot of things that I can do. I'm basically trying to work out how to go from freelance to permanent, and hopefully something that's going to use a decent chunk of my skillset, but perhaps I need to re-think. 

@poopipeWhen you say "what you're asking for an example of is a tiny, tiny part of a much bigger system of tools and processes"...Looking through the "Tech Artist - What are you working on?" section is very informative, so thanks for that suggestion. These are things that I would previously have thought would be "Tools Programmer" roles. I'd envisaged that I was working towards an "Art Director" role, and learning aspects of technical implementation seemed necessary to do that role well, but I may just be way off course with this.