I realize that the kinds of tools one will make depends on the necessities of the team, but when it comes to practicing, and since I’ve never been part of a game dev team, how does one know what kind of tools to make?
Right now, for practice, I’m writing a tool that will build a simple skeleton, skin it, and rig it (still in the beginnings of this tool of course), but I feel like no one would ever need a tool to build a skeleton.
Anyways, without an art/game dev background how would I, or anyone else in a similar situation, know what types a tools an artist would need (Maya or Photoshop for example).
Join a mod or indie game team and ask? Or even better, volunteer for a mod or indie team that actually has some experience so they can give you better ideas for the sorts of tools they need (a team of students who have never used tools are probably not going to come up with great ideas).
…just as an example. There’s plenty of communities out there centered around the games/engines they work with. Pick your fave and offer to lend a hand.
I’ll go ahead and ditto finding a mod team to work with as I used to be very active in the modding community (both with Source and Unreal).
While you’ll most likely be working remote, you will still get a sense of how things work and what problems you will see devs struggle with. From there you can really get a sense of what tools are needed and work with your team to come up with a good solution.
Mod teams is a really good idea to get experience and ideas, as well as get something to show in your portfolio.
I was quite active in the Neverwinter Nights modding community, which got me a contract with Bioware to do art for their “premium modules” (before the term DLC). That got me to switch to an art program from computer science. And when I needed an internship I fell back on my time in the Ghost Recon modding community, which quickly got me a position at Grin (who at that time where making the PC version on Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2).
+1 for joining a mod. The mod community learned me how to fail and get up again. It is very good for making some important mistakes on a early stage.
And for the tools discussion. Most of the people will not tell you what tools to make. You will have to discover yourself by asking questions, observe, …
I find that question so foreign to my experience I wonder why would you be interested in being a technical artist to begin with?
Not knowing the concerns and not having an idea where to even begin…
What do you hope to bring to the table compared to someone driven or “burdened” enough to self teach their way to solve these problems?
In other words,
If your first question is “what should my first questions be like?” Then I would wonder where you were “coming from” that you would want to do tech art?
Is it considered the hip thing nowadays?
If not able to commit to the responsibility of a MOD team…
I would also suggest:
Go visit the Cgtalk forums and write tools based on those user’s needs which, will be many and varied. That survey attempted will provide insight, experience and the end users there will be very grateful and supportive with feedback ( bugs or praises )
[QUOTE=claydough;13235]I find that question so foreign to my experience I wonder why would you be interested in being a technical artist to begin with?
Not knowing the concerns and not having an idea where to even begin…
What do you hope to bring to the table compared to someone driven or “burdened” enough to self teach their way to solve these problems?
In other words,
If your first question is “what should my first questions be like?” Then I would wonder where you were “coming from” that you would want to do tech art?
Is it considered the hip thing nowadays?
[/QUOTE]
Wow that’s a bit harsh. Sounds like something said by someone who’s lost perspective on things.
Austin already mentioned he’s practicing building rigging tools, which would imply that he’s on the right track.
The fact is there’s not enough information out there to know what goes on inside a Games Studio that those on the outside can just go ‘I will learn this then this then this’. I mean most of the people I work with don’t know what I do. But he’s picked up that this is something he’s interested in getting better at and is looking for more focused ways to hone his skills.
You make it sound like he’s just said ‘I want to be a brain surgeon… what’s a person?’
I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in Tech. Art to at least pursue it enough to find out whether it is for them, and those that stick will hopefully raise awareness of the role we perform.
[QUOTE=snoutling;13244]Wow that’s a bit harsh. Sounds like something said by someone who’s lost perspective on things.
Austin already mentioned he’s practicing building rigging tools, which would imply that he’s on the right track.
The fact is there’s not enough information out there to know what goes on inside a Games Studio that those on the outside can just go ‘I will learn this then this then this’. I mean most of the people I work with don’t know what I do. But he’s picked up that this is something he’s interested in getting better at and is looking for more focused ways to hone his skills.
You make it sound like he’s just said ‘I want to be a brain surgeon… what’s a person?’
I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in Tech. Art to at least pursue it enough to find out whether it is for them, and those that stick will hopefully raise awareness of the role we perform.[/QUOTE]
Haha, thanks for that snoutling.
claydough, it is a bit odd that someone with your “experience” would immediately think that I’m not driven and that I know nothing about what a TA does solely based on my question. I’ve always been interested in the art side of game development, and instead of saying “I wish I knew how to do that”, I’ve decided to start learning how to do those things. I would always watch my friend model, texture, and do whatever else he did, and I would constantly be bombarding him with questions, only later to google what he spoke about to learn more in depth information. Coming from a programming degree, I do not know the problems that artist run into while doing what they do, so I thought I would ask. I am learning to rig, which I’m sure will help me learn what tools will help me speed up my rigging process, but that takes time. So I thought maybe I could find more information quickly.
As for everyone else, I appreciate all of your input. It seems that modding is the best way, so I’ve been looking into joining a mod team. Being a console junkie, I don’t own many PC games. Anyways, thank you all.
Ok, as a TA of Photoshop I would expect you to be able to solve this problem:
You have a directory of files of sequential images. Named: test_shot<number> (ie: test_shot0039) You need to create a single (our multiple, see below) sprite animation atlas. All the images are to be placed one after another in the current sized photoshop document. Create a tool to “place” the sequential images inside one document, or multiple documents if the directory’s files don’t fit within a single document. Keep the size of the image in the individual files the same as the united atlas. Also add the label(watermark) of each frame number on top of the image. (This will be added programatically.) All this should happen with only a single click.
As for his response. I don’t think he was being harsh as much as saying, you need to spend more time trying to find the answers, before you post a question on here. This forum is full of information. You questions have been asked many times. I once asked your exact questions.
Most of what we do as a tech-artist is figure some shit out on our own. You should start now. Save the questions for the hard parts. Take 2 days of your own time figuring it out before you post. You’ll understand once you try. You’ll also learn more, and discover new things along the way.
Don’t discount Claydough’s feedback. It may sound harsh or critical, but instead of taking it personally it is extremely valuable advice that you should heed.
Many TA’s (myself included) got into this game by just being faced with problems and being forced to solve them. You have an opportunity to choose your own starting path.
Seeking out, identifying and solving problems is an absolutely foundational skill to build. Visiting the Cgtalk forums as Claydough suggested is an excellent idea. Forums and question/answer sites are an amazing research tool where people are asking all sorts of questions about how to do things.
There are all sorts of juicy problems hidden in between the lines just waiting for you to solve them.
If you look back on how the Tech-role generally came to be, it was to fill a gap between art and programming. If you had to define that gap, what kind of example tasks would take to explain to someone about this gap? Then take those examples and look around for unsolved problems or find other peoples solution to this problem and do your own take of the problem.
A part of being a TA is also to be able to recognize problems and find solutions for it. Because not all artists will come to you and say “this is an issue with my workflow” because they don’t see the potential of a solution. So as rob said, if you go the Mod way, make sure they have a problem for you to start out with at the begininng.
Since I went from art to tech, I had all my classmates as my art team, and just as you watched you friend, I watched them work to see what funny and inefficent/repetetive stuff they did(:):), or I just asked what issues they could see themselves with their workflow. I also hade the benefit of knowing the general workflow for an artist and could ask myself, “what do I think would be neat to have as an artist?”.
Also remember that a TA doesn’t have to do tools for DCC apps all the time. You can work with writing Shaders or Visual effects aswell, or any other standalone software.
[QUOTE=tistatos;13249]A part of being a TA is also to be able to recognize problems and find solutions for it. Because not all artists will come to you and say “this is an issue with my workflow” because they don’t see the potential of a solution.[/QUOTE]
this is a hugely important thing from my perspective. at all of the places i’ve worked, only a handful of people have ever been conscious of what is possible and were able to give good suggestions for tools. most of the time you have to observe what’s going on around you and take cues from it. austin, you say that you watch your friend model and texture and stuff. that’s a great place to start - keep an eye on what he’s doing. or better yet, learn some of those things yourself. eventually you will stumble on situations where you think to yourself ‘oh my god this takes forever and i do it all the time.’ congratulations, you just found an opportunity to make a tool.
just becoming familiar with the 3d process - modeling, texturing, shaders, rigging, lighting - any facet of it will provide you opportunities to realize where you can improve on what’s already there. that’s your role in a nutshell. joining a game mod group can expedite that process for you so it’s immensely useful but there is still an awareness of how things work that will make you a valuable team member.
Alright, great. Thanks again for the feedback guys. I will start keeping my questions to myself then, until I’ve search for them for a while. I also think I’ll ask for that shader dvd from eat3d.com for christmas
I still want to join a mod team, I’m just not sure that I would be an asset to the team with the little experience I have. I don’t want to hold their projects back.
I also read about Scaleform… just another thing I want to learn (UI always grabs my attention/interest), but that will have to wait. Too many things, so little time!
Again, thanks all. Appreciate the time you take to read and answer.
[QUOTE=Austin;13252]
I also read about Scaleform… just another thing I want to learn (UI always grabs my attention/interest), but that will have to wait. Too many things, so little time!
Again, thanks all. Appreciate the time you take to read and answer.[/QUOTE]
Scaleform aint hat bad. Just worked with it and hey finally put in as3 support in the recent build of udk.
[QUOTE=haiddasalami;13275]Scaleform aint hat bad. Just worked with it and hey finally put in as3 support in the recent build of udk.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, there aren’t many tuts on how to use it with straight code though, all of the tuts use kismet (for some reason I don’t want to use kismet). So it will take a bit of looking through the scaleform documentation/API reference to understand how to load the flash movies, interact with the actionscript, and whatever else is involved. So for now I’ll just keep learning Maya, rigging, and PyMEL and I will jump to shaders or scaleform next (who know how long that will be :( User Interfaces/GUIs have always interested me a whole lot. I guess it’s since the player has a constant interaction with them in one way or another, I feel they can make a huge difference in a game if done correctly, or incorrectly. So I should be the one to do it correctly! :laugh:
[QUOTE=Austin;13245]Haha, thanks for that snoutling.
claydough, it is a bit odd that someone with your “experience” would immediately think that I’m not driven and that I know nothing about what a TA does solely based on my question. I’ve always been interested in the art side of game development, and instead of saying “I wish I knew how to do that”, I’ve decided to start learning how to do those things. I would always watch my friend model, texture, and do whatever else he did, and I would constantly be bombarding him with questions, only later to google what he spoke about to learn more in depth information. Coming from a programming degree, I do not know the problems that artist run into while doing what they do, so I thought I would ask. I am learning to rig, which I’m sure will help me learn what tools will help me speed up my rigging process, but that takes time. So I thought maybe I could find more information quickly.
As for everyone else, I appreciate all of your input. It seems that modding is the best way, so I’ve been looking into joining a mod team. Being a console junkie, I don’t own many PC games. Anyways, thank you all.[/QUOTE]
I stand corrected then… ( to be honest, I thought you might be wasting yer time and was trying to steer you away from frustration ).
I apologize if that sounded harsh. ( I thought I was tip toeing around the issue? )
What I mean by “yer question is foreign to my experience” is that you should be busting at the seams with ideas that will improve workflows.
I also find that the tools I create that the end user “didn’t know he needed in the first place” are the ones that are appreciated and used most often. In which case I would suggest not to get bogged down in “insecurities” and the supposedly “right way” to go about getting ideas. As that is converse to “innovation”.
( in other words, if the right way already exists then what are we even needed for? )
What was most frustrating for me in the beginning was the “absense” of what seemed to me to be the obvious “right way”. Learning the technology and releasing as much to a positive reception ( vindication of contribution ). sealed my fate and got me HOOKED.
I suppose in the end I do believe that it is better to be an artist whose intuition will serve to solve what is painfully frustrating for an artist better than someone “surveying for a solution” from outside that immediate experience.
So hopefully your relationship with your artist friends and your own artistic experiences will serve you best.
[QUOTE=claydough;13303]I suppose in the end I do believe that it is better to be an artist whose intuition will serve to solve what is painfully frustrating for an artist better than someone “surveying for a solution” from outside that immediate experience.
So hopefully your relationship with your artist friends and your own artistic experiences will serve you best.[/QUOTE]
That is what worries me the most. But I’m going to stick to my guns and keep learning maya and rigging, and then hopefully jump into other areas. I would love to learn to simply model, but I don’t think that would be the most beneficial right now (but then again, since I’ve never really done it, I don’t know if there are needed tools for it).
There is not really a fixed way of becoming a technical artist. Every person has its own story, which makes it so interesting. So try out the way you want to do it and learn from all the mistakes that will happen. Mistakes always happen and our a source of learning.
Modelling is still important when rigging. Because you need to have knowledge of good edge flow for a nice deformation of the mesh.
User Interfaces/GUIs have always interested me a whole lot. I guess it’s since the player has a constant interaction with them in one way or another, I feel they can make a huge difference in a game if done correctly, or incorrectly. So I should be the one to do it correctly! :laugh: