How many of you actively work on your artistic talents outside of your very tech-oriented jobs? Do you find this activity to be worthwhile for your career as a Tech Artist?
I’ve been spending some of my spare time working on 3D art, both for personal enjoyment and also for the potential addition of it to my portfolio. I wonder if this time is being well spent, or if I should be spending it on more tech-related endeavors?
I’m curious what other people think about this!
I occasionally get to do some modeling and I try to do life drawing as much as possible, but I’m pretty much all code now. It’s good to have an understanding of at least workflow and such for the artist in order to build the best tools for them.
I was asked to start writing a more awesome pipeline for the compositing artists here and actually sat down with one for a few days to watch him take a scene from start to finish. Gave me tons to work from. So I’ll say it’s good to keep a leg in on the art side for sure.
I just work on code projects in my free time. Like what bharris said I sit down and watch the content creators work to improve their pipeline.
There is so much tech to learn and it changes so much I really don’t have time to model or animate. Learning a new language or implementing a new design pattern will yield radical results across all departments in your studio because you can make better tools.
Balance is important. There often is not as much time to put in to art but ART part of tech art is important. Of the computer is often better, like most things in life…experience with real media often has a greater positive impact on your computer work.
I love to still draw and sketch from life when I can, photography is a great “real time” artistic outlet and a great way to gather reference material at the same time:)
So focus on your work but never feel bad for doing other things besides just that…long term it will be a better life and you won’t burn out on the work.
@Brandon- Glad to hear, It is always worth the time to sit with the artist, I wish more programmers and tech people would and that more Art teams would require it.
Same- however I’ve always found that knowledge in a subject significantly off the ‘critical path’ of your work can magnify your creativity and thought process. I think you see this in any great programmer, they have some really expert knowledge in some other area that influences their thought process. It is important to stretch your neurons in a different direction.
I am only partially a tech artist, and even then it is focused on characters/animation. I think that tech art is such a vast field that there is room for “hard-core” dedicated writers and then there is a sub-class like myself, who benefits my team by being able to be a go between with related departments to the character team I am on.
Drawing is thinking, do it often.
I paint. With paint and brushes. And I smash myself up on my mountainbike quite a lot.
I think it’s important to have the art perspective because we make tools and design pipelines to help people who are artists. They think in a particular way which we need to have some affinity with.
I tend to try and run through doing some art or animation work to help work out the pipe line, coming from an animation background I do still love to do a bit of animating so I do do it fairly often.
I never stop. I have an acrylic painting going, and am developing a graphic novel. I’ve noticed that the more technical my work becomes, the better I am with art. It’s an odd leveling system of neural mapping in your brain I think.
Actually once i leave work, the whole visual aspect of art pretty much goes away for me, but I do stay artistic by producing and performing music…anything to keep the creative brain from atrophy i suppose…
lately I’ve been going with the artists at my company to figure drawing at least once a week. My drawing is getting much better! Plus it helps me understand more about how they work.
the degree I’m working on is a visual one, so that keeps me in more visual work than I’d prefer (being as I have almost no time to code). Over the summer I did a lot of sketching while sitting outside of pubs or cafes. bottle of wine or beer, little snack, sketchbook, and quill pens.