Tech-Artists.org would like to present our first interview, with Steve Theodore, the Technical Art Director at Bungie Studios. He goes over his history and experience, where the tech art field is going, and gives advice to aspiring technical artists. Thanks to Adrian Walker for conducting the interview and Steve for being a great first interviewee. Look for more interviews every couple weeks.
Adrian Walker: Thanks a bunch for agreeing to be interviewed! To get things started, why don’t you provide us with a few tidbits of who you are?
Steve Theodore: I got into computer graphics about 15 years ago. I was a grad student in, of all things, Roman History. However, I used to make money on the side by teaching graphic artists how to use Macintoshes – grad students always need money – and this ended up with me helping out a company that had a laser slide printer, which in 1992, was the height of high tech. Those guys got a magazine called Computer Pictures, which was pretty much the only source of information about computer graphics in those days.
Amazing stuff was going on in those days – one month you’d see the first application of skinned models, the next you’d see about this hot new idea called “bump mapping”, and so on. I got really into reading up on this stuff while I was waiting for the laser slide printer to crank out slides, and I started hanging out around the university graphics lab playing with their text-based rendering system.
After a while I was spending a lot more time on ray-tracing than I was on the Romans. I dropped out of grad school and started my own studio doing anything I could do in CG. I did a lot of architectural visualizations, some TV commercials, and a lot of side loops for trade show kiosks. What I really wanted to do, though, was animate, and there just wasn’t enough animation work for a little studio.
I headed off to SIGGRAPH hoping to get a job at ILM or Pixar (this was when Pixar was still a graphics geek cult thing, way before Toy Story), but ended up with an offer from FASA Interactive in Chicago, where I went in 1995 to work on MechCommander. I started off building giant Mechs (every boy’s dream job) and helped out with the animations in the cinematics. The big drawback to that job was the fact that those cinemas used to take 10 - 15 minutes per frame to render, so I spent a lot of time reading BattleTech novelizations and playing Quake.
I went to Valve in 1997, where I was really excited to work on real-time characters. I came on to Half-Life pretty late, so I had a very random set of jobs to do. I did most of the player weapons, for example, but also the big yellow loader robot from the opening train ride and some incidental creatures. My favorite job was animating scripted sequences, which at that time we did on Biped (in those days that was the only interactive IK tool you could get. The IK animations for that loader robot had to be calculated off line – you’d set up the IK targets and twiddle some knobs and then wait 5 minutes while the animation was “solved” for you. Yuck.)
I started getting into the technical art side while working on Team Fortress Classic. Like everybody else we suffered a lot from the “candy wrapper” twist artifacts in our character shoulders, and I wanted to solve it by adding extra deformation bones. Nowadays this is completely standard, but back then it was very mysterious – it was particularly hard to do because Bipeds didn’t play very well with anything else in Max, but it taught me a lot about the basics of 3D math and character rigging.
We wanted to move the Team Fortress team from Max to Maya but we couldn’t convince any of the engineers to write us an exporter, so I learned MEL and wrote a text exporter. That was probably the moment I really started to think like a tech artist – I started doing things like scripts for mapping Maya materials onto the Source engine shader system, or automatically updating a character’s animation list. In 1999 or 2000, though, there wasn’t a recognized label for technical artists in games so most of this was spare time work rather than my day job – I was mostly a doing character models and animations, particularly for Team Fortress and Counter-Strike.
By 2002 I was really interested the big knot of problems that connected character rigging and in-game animation. I was invited to join RAD Game Tools, where I helped out with the Granny animation middleware system. It was a real education in the nuts and bolts of graphics, as well as a great opportunity to do demo art. The only drawback was the fact that I was the whole art department – I really grew to miss working with a team and shipping games.
After three years at RAD I was recruited to help Zipper Interactive make the transition from PS2 to PS3, so I helped them get to grips with the new realities of high-res models, fancy shaders, and high detail environments. Partly because of that experience, I was tapped to be one of the founders of a startup a couple of years later, which came agonizingly close to a deal but didn’t pan out in the end. Luckily for me a friend at Bungie wanted to get together for lunch, and quite by accident the lunch visit turned into an all day interview and a day later I found myself in my current job, which is Technical Art Director at Bungie. I was there for the last seven or eight months of Halo 3, and since then I’ve been doing a big overhaul of the Bungie pipeline.
AW: You mentioned how back in 1999-2000 the position of technical artist didn’t really exist. Nowadays technical artists are seen in many of the top studios around the world, and are finding their way into even the smaller ones. How do you picture the role of the technical artist continuing to evolve as we move into the future?
ST: I think there’s two main ways the tech art positions will develop. As content gets more and more complex, a lot of energy is just going to go into taming the creation process. I expect you’ll find that studios’ toolsets will be diverging more and more as our tools get more sophisticated – the Max or Maya of a racing game studio may be barely recognizable to somebody coming over from an RTS studio or vice-versa. It’s going to be tech artists who drive that evolution, since they know both the technical skills you need to make those tools but also the workflow and artistic issues that are important for making good tool designs.
On the more interesting side, though, I also think you’ll see some tech artists evolving into procedural content authors. Consider the differences between a really good rigger and an animation programmer… who really knows what the right approach to posing a character is? Is it the guy with the knowledge of C++ and “engineer” on his business card, or the guy who spends 50 hours a week designing systems for posing characters? Just as there’s already a whole class of game designers who are really writing code – just not in compiled languages – on the design side, there will be a whole class of content people who make content procedurally – shaders, procedural textures (check out the latest software from Allegorithmic if you want some inspiration), systems for building procedural geometry, and animations. None of the procedural stuff will ever displace “real” artists – you want it for filler, for quick rough outs, and for enabling open worlds and open ended gameplay. But it’s going to be very important. Not to plug too ham-handedly, but I did a talk for Microsoft Research’s academic program this year that goes into a lot more detail on this subject – it’s at http://www.academicresourcecenter.net/curriculum/pfv.aspx?ID=7296
AW: What about being a technical artist attracted you to the field?
ST: I think most of us have a common personality trait – a bizarre combination of restless energy and complete laziness. A tech artist is the sort of person who looks at a busted way of doing things and says, “This is ridiculous, I shouldn’t have to spend 5 minutes on this every time” – so he turns around and spends 5 hours writing a tool to get around the 5 minute bottleneck. When I run into one of these things that seems really pointless and time wasting I take it really personally, and I want to beat it into submission.
AW: Throughout your career you have worked on a number of very popular technologies and games. Do you find the love that gamers have for these games to be a huge draw for you to push the envelope, in addition to your desire to just “beat the technical bottlenecks into submission”?
ST: Well, mostly I’ve been insanely fortunate to work with such great projects and people. Lots of folks do really brilliant work that goes completely unrecognized because they are on unlucky teams or ill-fated projects – being on a l33t project, including the ones I’ve been on, involves a large element of luck. That said, being on a good team and a good product really is inspiring – it’s a multiplier on everything you do – it makes you willing to sacrifice more nights and weekends just to see something great become amazing. If you’re stuck on a project that’s clearly going nowhere, on the other hand, it’s sometimes a real drag just showing up for work in the morning. So I’m constantly grateful to be where I am, and I work my butt off hoping that I can sort of deserve the great good luck I’ve had in the form of my teammates.
AW: When in your career did you discover that working as a technical artist (as compared to a more ‘pure’ artist or programmer) was what you wanted to do?
ST: I think it was partly the fact that I worked on some very small teams (TF and Counter-Strike) where nothing would ever get done if you couldn’t be more productive than a more manual, craft-oriented artist. That really changed my way of thinking.
AW: Could you tell us a bit about some of your favorite tools and technologies that you enjoy working with / make your life easier as a technical artist?
ST: Lately I’ve been doing a lot more “real” programming, mostly in C# – which sometimes makes me impatient with the limitations of MAXScript and MEL. We’ve been working hard to avoid duplicating effort between our Max and Maya tools, which gets to be a big hassle when you need to support both.
AW: C# really seems to be gaining more and more momentum in the games industry for tools development. Python seems to be pretty hot as well. What has drawn you to C# over Python?
ST: C# and Python are both great. For Bungie, we do a ton of application development in C#, so it makes sense for us to do as much of our art pipeline that way as possible. C# also has really good, standardized dev tools and a whole boatload of really excellent standard libraries. Since it’s compiled there’s a slight performance edge over Python too, but I don’t think it’s such a blowout that you shouldn’t think about Python, especially when PyMEL matures enough to make Maya into a really robust development platform. If you’re a Max or MotionBuilder house in particular Python is an easier route – people who are interested in that area should check out some of the talks and master classes Jason Parks has done for Autodesk over the last few years.
We’re about 75% Max / 25 % Maya, so Max’s .Net support outweighed Maya’s Python commitment for us. We’ll probably end up doing a .Net host inside of Python and getting the best of both worlds. However I’m always worried about the classic tech-artist personality trait of perfectionism – if you chase the technically correct solution to every problem you’ll end up supporting 10 languages and 4 art packages and you’ll spend all your time applying patches and downloading updates instead of actually making tools.
AW: What advice can you give students who are looking into finding jobs as technical artists in the future?
ST:Scripting is the first requirement – you need to be able to convince both fellow artists and engineers that you can do most of the light or medium duty tasks in script, without involving engineers (except, especially at the beginning, as mentors for good programming practice). The tech artist’s number one job is to be able to take an idea that is done by social engineering (“remember you always have to name it like this and set the two sided flag on!”) into something done by a tool (“click this button to set it up for export”).
The web is full of scripts, some pretty awesome and some really poor – poking around on the forums of Highend3d or CGChannel is a great way to see how other people do things. Maya gurus like Ryan Ellis or Brian Ewert, or Max gods like Bobo Petrov are also really useful for inspiring you to see what’s possible.
After that you should look at both character rigging for animation and shader writing – ideally you’d pick up both, but they’re very different skill sets and it’s hard to excel in both at the same time. The transition from scripting to rigging is probably gentler than from scripting to shaders.
One thing I always stress, though, is you can’t be a great technical artist unless you’re at least a competent production artist too. If you haven’t got a good eye and some personal understanding of the ups and downs of working on a game, it’s hard to really help line artists – and that, after all, is what tech artists are for. A stint as a working animator or modeler or effects artist is really valuable down the road. This does mean it’s hard to focus on tech art early, so it’s a good idea to be clear with potential employers about your goals.
This is one place where the “neither fish nor fowl” part of tech art is tricky, because landing that job as a half-artistic, half-techie noob competing with other noobs who are, at least, specialists is a tall order. One useful trick is to do art which complements your tech specialty – if you’re a rigger, do some creatures that really benefit from clever rigging; if you’re a shader artists, do work that showcases your shaders. But always judge the work as art – if you think it looks like a tech demo, the interviewer will too.
Last but not least, learning a good modern language like C# or Java will teach you a lot about the guts of “real” programming (MAXScript and MEL are very powerful but they’re also pretty odd ducks as programming environments, and it’s good to get an idea of what the big kids play with even if scripting is your main tool).
AW: Thanks a bunch for your time! I’m sure everyone visiting tech-artists.org will enjoy reading this.
Please tell us what you think of the interview, and who you’d like to see interviewed in the future! And if you liked what Steve had to say, you can read more of him in his Pixel Pusher column in Game Developer magazine.
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