I want to become a technical arist for games. I’m an animator & artist with some Maya experience, tho the bulk of my 15+ year career has been 2D flash/casual games. Since I started working in 1995 I feel like I’ve watched the game industry mature from the sidelines, and I really want to get up to speed on state of the art, game appropriate rigging and tool building.
I’m somewhat technical minded, but have no formal coding training -I’m a cut and paste scripter, adapting what I find to my needs. I’ve built some Flash tools in Javascript and done a small bit of MEL -tho often with help from “real” engineers. My library includes MEL for animators, Osipa’s Stop Staring, and Allen & Murdock’s Body Language (the books are great but leave me wondering what will/won’t be appropriate for a game pipeline) and have begun workign my way through them.
My goal is to reach a point where I can confidently build appropriate and helpful tools for a game production pipeline.
I feel like the 2 biggest holes in my resume are:
1.) the lack of formal Programming Classes and
2.) the lack of serious time in the trenches of art production on current gen games.
I suppose the simple question is: which should I focus on? (probably both…)
Is a formal Comp Sci Degree a must?
Are there some good online resources for learning to code well?
I’ve experimented Unity and Unreal Ed engines - are these good for learning?
any other suggestions for my library, that would be good for a programming noob?
It might not be the best avenue for success, but you can pretty much home school yourself the whole thing, with the internet, its just youll have no formal qualifications. I guess what you would have is a portfolio instead, might be just as good.
So just KEEP LEARNING!! and start small, give yourself little projects and goals to finish starting with the current skillset you have now, and slowly grow… the animation world is always changing, and theres new editors and methods that are going to keep coming out for it.
From the talk I had with a recruitment guy earlier today, as i’m in the same boat, he suggested the best approach is probably to pick the tech art area that most matches your skills and work on that while exploring other stuff as you go.
I think it’s perfectly doable to teach yourself what you need, it’s just at some point you’ll probably want some exposure to the industry in regards to the pipeline aspect of being a technical artist.
The TA talks from GDC 2011 are also pretty insightful for an idea of what kind of stuff they’ve had to do to get their jobs etc.
The job postings are also a good bullet-point list of things to practice and learn. Every time I see a job posting with a skill I don’t know that sounds interesting, I add it to my “things to learn” list.
I’m also looking at Tech Artist after being made redundant in my previous Game Build Technician role, and had it suggested to me by a TA lead in an interview for another role. I was surprised to be pointed at anything with “artist” in the title, but I think he meant for me to lean very on the technical side, working with the pipeline.
Bit of background, my degree is in Business Communication systems, that’s project management, business, networks, HCI, and some Flash and Game-based electives. In my last job I worked in C# a lot, and automated the build update system, which dealt with SVN and a bunch of in-house tools, and generally tried to streamline a bunch of the processes people were doing every day.
What should I be doing to strengthen my case for being a TA? I’m doing some work with UDK now, and was meaning to make some basic assets in Autodesk Mod Tool to get a better understanding of how this stuff gets into the game. I’ve also been playing with effects, but should I be looking at writing shaders by hand as well? And do I need to learn to script for Maya or Max?
Is there a minimum level of artistic ability I’m going to need to display, or will it be enough to show I can get the stuff “proper” artists all together and in the game?
A TA role would fit nicely- the soft and hard skills would transition over quite well.
I’d suggest making some pretty and ‘technical’ art (fx, shaders, procedural stuff), to show you have some understanding of the art creation process. If you don’t care for art, I wouldn’t bother trying to pretend to be artistic. Look at the type of work TA’s do (scripting, shaders), do as much of it as you can. I think it’s important to be clear you’re not an artist and have a stronger background and skills as a coder- this will make a number of studios pass on you but enough will need exactly that role. The truth is, given your skills and background, I think you’d be a much better fit for a decently sized TA team than most art-focused TA’s around. Some places value fresh perspectives, backgrounds, and skills.
Thanks, that’s very constructive, and the more people that tell me the idea isn’t crazy the better. I’ll look at making some shaders right away.
With scripting, I take it you mean in 3D packages? Will Mod Tool C# scripting be helpful, or should I make a point of getting hold of Max or Maya? I think I have a GMax installer somewhere, would that be any use, or has MaxScript changed a lot since that was still supported?
Will UDK work (UnrealScript, effects) be useful? I see a lot of talk about UDK on these boards, but for portfolio and potential employment purposes, is making effects from flowcharts going to help me when not everywhere uses the engine (though some of my preferred potential employers here in the UK do)? Though I understand you can get script output from effects made this way.
To answer your question about the UDK being useful, I say absolutely. Maybe I’m biased from working for a studio that uses the Unreal engine, but there’s a lot of stuff there that can be translated to other software packages quite easily. Unreal is a powerful tool for getting into understanding shaders quite easily, and particles are a problem solvers dream in trying to figure out how to make an awesome effect that’s efficient.
Edit: I should also mention that the Unreal Material Editor has a display so you can actually see the code behind the material you’ve created. It’s actually how I learned to set up shaders on my own.
Understanding what can be done with particles is also really essential for animators since so much work overlaps in the realm. Our animators and technical animators are familiar enough with what we can do to be able to come up with cool ideas and knowing at least if something is possible.
I highly recommend picking it up since it’s free, robust, and having knowledge of more programs is always better than not, even if it’s just enough to know how things work.
Ok, but what kind of game artist? One of the first things you might want to think about is what area you want to specialize in. Is specialization absolutely necessary? No, it’s not…in fact the smaller game companies will probably be looking for artists that can do a lot of different things. If a small company has say, two artists, those artists are going to need to know how to do a lot of various art related tasks. But as companies get larger and have say, 20 or more artists, there’s probably going to be more specialization going on.
So that’s probably a good place for us to start…let’s take a look at the different types of game art specialties. These are some of what you’ll frequently see listed at game company websites under the Now Hiring or Jobs Available sections.
and start small, give yourself little projects and goals to finish starting with the current skillset you have now, and slowly grow… the animation world is always changing, and theres new editors and methods that are going to keep coming out for it.