A Day in the life

Professional
1

Hi guys,

My company asked me to put together a report on the role of technical artists and how they contribute to a production team. I started researching this by attending tech art sessions at GDC and by talking to some tech artists there at the conference. This was all a great start and eventually led me here.

Now I’m wondering if a few of you could give me an idea of what a typical day is like. Maybe it’d be easier to talk about a typical week or month or year? Maybe it’s easier to talk in terms of projects.

After reading the “Technical Artist job description at your company” thread, I’ve really come to understand how varied tech artist roles can be, so I’m interested in day-to-day examples.

Also, I’d be grateful to hear anything else you guys might want to throw out there. What kind of things would you talk about to both describe the role of TAs and also to sell, say management, on how valuable you are? Concrete examples of how time/money/headaches were saved would be particularly helpful.

Thanks!
Rob

2

I jokingly track how well I’m doing on a project by how many times I’ve paid my salary. So maybe I can give you some examples. We had a process for creating objects that could take 2 days for the in-game set-up. Programming could not understand why it was so hard for Art and Design. By distilling it to logical inputs and outputs we brought that down to about 2 minutes. This process was done by 6 people every week over the course of the project. That took about 3 days of development, and has required 3 other days for support. During mid production I was doing massive reorganization of data. These would happen over the course of an afternoon to program and an evening to execute. We tested this against the manual speed. It took a human a little over a week, poor guy. During late production I was called in to do things like debug significantly complex physics set ups, and develop sanity checks to catch potential bugs.

We think of Tech Artists as programmers beholden to the art director. With either a significantly art-savvy tech team, or very smart artists, I don’t think tech artists are necessary. For us, however, tech artists allow us to hire very good traditional artists, and let one or two guys be smart for them.

As for daily life, I get in the morning, and check for holdups in the art pipeline. Prior to lunch is almost always team support, either fixing issues, talking to tech about art needs and concerns, or coaching other Tech Artists. After lunch will normally be observing artists and designers, generally looking over some concern they had. Late afternoon is sharer development if nothing else comes up. Tools development happens after core hours when I can focus. Then I go home, and spend the late nights e-mailing offshore teams. Weekends are off limits to work, because otherwise I would go insane.

3

[QUOTE=Dreamline;3233]Hi guys,

My company asked me to put together a report on the role of technical artists and how they contribute to a production team. I started researching this by attending tech art sessions at GDC and by talking to some tech artists there at the conference. This was all a great start and eventually led me here.

Now I’m wondering if a few of you could give me an idea of what a typical day is like. Maybe it’d be easier to talk about a typical week or month or year? Maybe it’s easier to talk in terms of projects.

After reading the “Technical Artist job description at your company” thread, I’ve really come to understand how varied tech artist roles can be, so I’m interested in day-to-day examples.

Also, I’d be grateful to hear anything else you guys might want to throw out there. What kind of things would you talk about to both describe the role of TAs and also to sell, say management, on how valuable you are? Concrete examples of how time/money/headaches were saved would be particularly helpful.

Thanks!
Rob[/QUOTE]

The role of TA at my job has me doing so many tasks spanning multiple departments that I got the the TA team moved into its own team that is in charge of Tech Art for the company as a whole rather than just this one studio. This way I can see at a higher level what tasks my team needs to be focusing their time on and what tasks can wait.

Form day to day my tasks change with great frequency. One day I could be on collision work, the next day I could be fixing the character system the next day making adjustments to light maps and so on. I do so much over the life of the project that it would take me forever to list all of things that I do. Basically I am the go to guy if something in the art or design pipeline breaks or if something needs to be figured out, documented, and implemented.

While the role of a TA is going to be different at every company that has one the value is going to be the same. Having a good TA that can change gears quickly jumping back and forth between programs and tasks is literally worth their weight in gold.

For example, during outsourcing ( We are now done with it) I was going through the submitted meshes and I noticed that a lot of the meshes where using to many material ID’s (some had 9+) and/or where not pushing the max out of every single triangle in the mesh. After some further investigation I found out that no one had set limits for the outsourcing company on the max material and poly counts they could use.

So I set up some guidelines for the outsourcing company’s to follow based on some performance testing I had been doing at the time. So with the next batch of assets that needed to be made I added the guidelines and when the meshes arrived they where way lower poly than the previous ones and most used under 4 material ID’s.

It took me about a day(+ or - 8 hours) to get all the limits established but that saved us days of time as the buildings could just go in the game and be used as is no clean up required. I am not sure how much “money” was saved by doing this but I can tell you that it would have taken 2 or more artist about 2 weeks to get all the buildings material and triangle counts down.

A good TA that can where many hats is a must have on any size project. I have run into many artist that are smart enough to figure out why something is not working correctly and fix it. But the problem is that the artist simply don’t have the time or dedication it takes to properly test and document something making sure to cover all angles and a TA does have that time. Some of the tasks that I currently do can be done by an artist but by off loading those tasks to me it frees them up to move froward and get more done.

In closing I would have to say that hiring a TA to work on a project would greatly help that project get out the door faster and with less bugs. A TA’s value is hard to define as at each company the term value is defined differently but over all again I think that they are worth their weight in gold.

4

[QUOTE=Dreamline;3233]

Now I’m wondering if a few of you could give me an idea of what a typical day is like. Maybe it’d be easier to talk about a typical week or month or year? Maybe it’s easier to talk in terms of projects.[/QUOTE]

An usual week, month or project is probably easier to describe.

A typical project to us is basically talking to everyone I can on the art and programming team, and attending to as much meetings they have as possible. People will be discussing their own problems most of the time, but I feel we gain so much insight from just being there at meetings. Then it’s scrabbling lots on pieces of paper trying to predict problems and gather the requirements right, and then planning the next few months, specially tools, pipeline, workflow documentation, tutorials and training resources.

Early in the project, it’s basically about putting the workflow together, letting people know about it, helping them understand why it should be this way and not that way, and usually getting some feedback from them (usually in the form of “Noooo that’s awful I don’t want to do that why do we have to do that? … aaah ok” :nod:).

Then a typical week is getting to the office (mostly a bit late) everyday, check in on my emails and bugs and realize there’s a lot to be done. People usually come to me with their problems, and we try to fix them as soon as possible to get everyone back up and running as fast as we can. We have been dealing with a lot of graphics programming and scripting for interfaces and cutscenes as well, so there’s always some production going on. And then, as expected, leave the office late. :D: