I’m a student in the Guildhall at SMU program for game development. I’m going to be graduating with my master’s in December, and moving on into the industry. I’d like to be a Technical Artist; I’m a reasonably decent modeler/texturer, and I have at least some experience rigging, animating, scripting (UnrealScript and Actionscript), making shaders (but not much HLSL), working with (but, alas, not setting up) pipelines and doing VFX work.
What kind of preparation should I be doing, if I want to be seriously considered for a tech artist position?
Showing you can script is a huge plus, we’ve been interviewing TA’s for a while now and it seems that there is a big discrepancy on what studios call a TA.
At Sony we’re basically mini programmers and the bridge between all departments, in other studios they range from someone that knows how to work the pipeline to someone that is just fighting fires.
It would be good to see what company you’d like to work and try see what they are looking for. This forum is actually a really good place to ask those kind of questions because we probably have every major studio represented =)
If you post your reel I’m sure everyone will be glad to post comments.
Looks like you have very good start on path to become TA,
As a TA you actually don’t have to do any of artistic work, but without any experience in 3d art, its hard to understand what an Artist wants,
Besides, TA is as passionate as lazy, so, we always look for patterns in all art workflow, and try to automate whatever we can,
Having some idea on Asset management pipeline is a big advantage,
Knowing one scripting language like Perl or Python(preferably) helps in quickly prototyping something, or even making full proof pipeline also,
[QUOTE=ADamiani;1254]What kind of preparation should I be doing, if I want to be seriously considered for a tech artist position?[/QUOTE]
I’d say get your hands into as many parts of the art production pipeline as time. While you certainly don’t have to be a virtuoso at anything, you should have a general idea of how everyone works. You’ve done some modeling and texturing, which is good, do some animation as well. Setup a character and at least do a few game loops just so you understand how that works. Get up on some of the newer tools/processes that are out there (naturalmotion, havok, etc). Ditto fx/physics. To echo what Vishang has said, i don’t feel you can be an effective TA without at least a little production art experience. I do think you can specialize at some point, like if you decide at some point you want to go the character rigging route (which is definitely a discipline all unto itself), branch off and get into that. Same with environments or modeling. I guess in general, get a feel for the parts of the pipe you like and want to support then dig in, at least to start. In my experience, it was way easier to learn things when i had a focused goal (ie writing character tools, animation tools, whatever) rather than trying to specialize in everything at once, but again, that’s just me:D:
I’d agree with Seth completely in regards to getting your hands wet in as many disciplines as possible. Admittedly my studio is probably an exception to the norm as far as TA roles go, but my role meant being one of the few people on the projects who had at least a basic understanding of what every content creator for the game did and how they worked. Understanding how not just artists, but designers and maybe even sound guys; basically anyone who interacted with art assets at all, are getting assets into the game through the pipeline helps you better discover how you can make each of their processes easier, more fluid, or more efficient. Sometimes you do that through convenient scripts or tools, or maybe by tacking some extra data onto an art asset to make someone’s job down the pipeline a tad bit easier…
In the end, all most TA’s do is try to make other members of the teams job a little easier. The best place to start in that endeavor is to know what it is their job actually entails.