"Hi! I’m still fairly new to the world of Tech Art. I work as a Technical Artist and a Real-Time VFX Artist. I started by self-learning. I’m really interested in workflow automation and would love to learn more about available resources and how to start building tools. What are the best courses to take? How should I choose a pipeline? Also, how can I set up Python for Unity and Unreal
Welcome warriorsfx!,
For starters, you’ve found an extraordinary resource in tech-artists.org. I’ve not found a better online community for technical artists. The folks here are kind, helpful, and generally awesome.
As for learning more about automation and tools building, it’s a gargantuan space (I can’t claim to have gotten very far into it, but I’m progressing). I think my advice here (for what it’s worth) is to start small. Identify a manageable problem. It doesn’t really need to be a novel or unsolved issue, but it does need to be something that can be addressed with a relatively simple solution. Ideally, you don’t want your first project in a new domain to be overly complex. Instead, it’s better to work up to increasingly ambitious projects gradually. In the former case, the project’s relatively long list of specific challenges can add a lot of peripheral drag to the process of learning the fundamentals of the space. Also, as one learning the fundamentals, there’s going to be a lot that you do in a less-than-optimal way. It’s handy to be able to “painlessly” move on from the completed solution (and the associated tech debt), having very little skin in the game.
I’m afraid that I don’t have much in the way of specific course recommendations to offer. To narrow things down a bit, is there a particular DCC or other context in which you’d like to do automation work or build tools?
I haven’t done much with Unity, but for Unreal, for me at least, setup is really just about picking an IDE (I like PyCharm, but there are tons of options, many free like VS Code) and then setting up debugging in Unreal. Once you’ve selected an IDE, you’ll be able to start the task of getting Python debugging up and running in Unreal’s Python interpreter with the chosen IDE. Epic’s docs on Python in Unreal are helpful. This page by Ryan DowlingSoka provides some useful tips for Python in Unreal, including instructions on how to execute Python code “asynchronously” and information on setting up VS Code for Unreal Python development.
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