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