In your opinions, what are some of the key features/skills/talents that makes for a bad ass tech artist. What separates the masters from everyone else?
The thing that separates the ‘masters’ for me is probably not what you’d expect. Hard skills like, rigging, scripting, VFX, etc… can all be taught. The skills that take time and a real understanding of the development process are the soft skills like - great communicators, always looking for win-win solutions, being proactive. When you can master the soft skills you are helping the team far beyond creating the next coolest tool! What good are fancy tools if you don’t understand the needs of the team to begin with?
I am with Syreian on this. You are not only making tools for the user, but you are also working with them.
Making the user feel comfortable and let them know you are here to help them out is a skill on its own.
And this is necessary to get the right information for making tools.
Also being flexible and adaptable to situations. Being a good learner but also teach what you know to help each other out.
Part of that equation is a steady diet of dogfood. One of the things that keeps TAs on top of their game is a real understanding of the needs of the production artist – which means having some real production experience and enough artistic chops to pinch-hit as a line artist once in a while. A visceral understanding of the user perspective is the thing that distinguishes TAs from ‘tools programmers who don’t know C++.’
The other ‘soft skill’ that the Greats always have is stubborness. Sheer dogged refusal to accept that ‘it just doesn’t work’ or ‘there’s no way to do that’. Even when things really don’t work, the spirit that just keeps plugging away at it and pulling loose threads until things unravel is what distinguishes TA’s from ‘artists who know some scripting’
[QUOTE=Theodox;19203]One of the things that keeps TAs on top of their game is a real understanding of the needs of the production artist – which means having some real production experience and enough artistic chops to pinch-hit as a line artist once in a while. A visceral understanding of the user perspective is the thing that distinguishes TAs from ‘tools programmers who don’t know C++.’[/QUOTE]
This is one reason it’s hard to start in the industry as a tech-artist. It’s better to have experienced all the problems an artist faces first-hand (and seen some solutions), before being put in a role to resolve them for other people.