Hey all,
Recently had a discussion with someone that raised a question to which I had no ready answer:
What is the Tech Art equivalent of an art test? How does it differ if the prospective TA is a rigger, effects artist, tools programmer, etc?
My discussion was focused principally on testing for a tools position. I thought it might be a good test to have the prospective hire develop a tool in Max, Maya, or standalone, which processes a batch of files by performing one or more actions on those files.
Thoughts? What do y’all do at your company?
I’ve been lucky to take a few tests like that. My favorite was a couple hour test (at home) that was a simple sounding problem that you could describe in one sentence, but it actually encompassed 5 or 6 different concepts about maya and programming that you had to know pretty well. I read the test problem and was like, “oh, yeah. easy.” Then I started on it… “ooooh, this is pretty tricky. Whoever designed this knew what they were doing.”
It’s totally impressive when someone can give a simple sounding problem, but as you try to solve/complete it, you become very aware that you’re being tested on specific skills.
The batch file test sounds like a good one, but it may be good to have creating those files as part of the test (instead of supplying them). Something like, “Write a program that generates n Maya files each with m cubes of dimensions l,w,h, … [now do something with those files… I dunno]”. The shorter the test problem the better, and I’d avoid supplying files to work on, just to keep things simple.
we have a simple test as pat described. Youre instructed to write 6 tools that perform simple tasks. However there are a bunch of concepts revealed in the tests. I’d give examples, but I dont want to ruin it
The applicant takes the test on their time and gives us the results.
we got an easy quiz here to test all kinds of different knowledge you’d encounter when working for us. It’s part IT troubleshooting (perforce, permissions, networking), part asset production (rigging, modeling, quality of assets), part scripting (data structures, logic, database), part engine (lighting, shading, rendering pipeline) related. Most questions are based on something we’ve come across at work. The idea is not so much to get everything right at the test, but to get those things right that you claim you know on your resume. Anything extra outside your core skills is an extra. It shows us how well rounded a candidate is. Then there’s two simple programming exercises where the candidate can use a computer and the maya/max help.
With juniors the focus is more on their motivation and personality. i.e. do you ask clever questions at the interview? Can you tell us why you want to be a tech artist? What in special do you want to do? Which game or tech art project would you love to work on? Talk about your favorite programming project at uni/your last job. By talking about their own stuff, their future work, and by getting them to describe on what they worked in the past you can learn a lot about the candidate.