So I’m spending some of my spare time making a quick proposal to my school (RIT) about a course directly related to Maya/3dsMax scripting, tool creation, etc. My basic goal is to have this be one senior level or masters level elective course, and maybe offer it bi-annually or something to ensure a full class size.
What sparked this is the fact that after multiple years of working in courses and spending a large amount of personal time working on my own, I want to see a class that directly caters to students that want to work as tech artists - a class that can tie-off their education and at least give them an idea of where they can grow from there on.
So I have 2 questions for you professionals:
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[li]Is there any predecessor to this known in academia or week-long courses that I haven’t found? I’m modeling my current projection off of the GDC Bootcamp materials
[/li][li]Is this even a good idea? I know that a sentiment shared by employers is that Tech Artist roles go to people with years experience working in the pipeline - while I would love to give people an introduction this, is this something that you can teach at a (soon to be) semester university?
[/li][/ol]
Oh, and a note about my submitting it - I will be going to the department of Computer Science first and then trying again with the Art Sciences department if the CS department is not interested; That may be a point of interest to some people as well.
Thanks in advance for any comments and content.
I think it would be a good idea, I just had a student ask me about what a tech-artist is and how to start looking into it (and i’m teaching Action script 3.0 right now), so I think it is time for some information to be presented to students so they are aware of whats out there BEFORE they graduate.
I would definitely agree, this is a great idea. I would note however, when I recently went through Depaul’s graphics and motion program, we were supposedly called technical directors (The chosen track within our program), this I found out is extremely misleading when you look at the video game industry, as your technical director does a completely different job function! Point being, ensure clarification is made between developing tools for video games, and developing for traditional animation houses. I would just make sure a healthy mix is used. I felt somewhat unprepared, as I’ve learned they are related but seem to be different animals. I’m sure more experienced individuals on here would have more insight however.:D:
To further clarify what I meant: Technical director - Wikipedia
(You’ll notice there are 2 distinctly different definitions from software dev to film)
While not sold as a Tech Artist class, I just completed teaching a 10-week course that I designed at Gnomon called Scripting for Production that I think served fairly well as an “Intro to Tech Art”. We focused on learning how to use scripting to automate and simplify various parts of a pipeline.
One of the things that I made a point of doing was making sure that I hit as many different areas as I could that Tech Artists cover. Lecture topics were about principles behind scripting and commands associated with those principles. Homework assignments were all scripts that varied across topics - there was a rigging script, a modeling script, a batching script, a material node script, etc. The one that was missing that I’ll make sure to include for next time was a dynamics script.
Something to consider about writing the curriculum for a course like this is that Tech Artists need to know a whole lot (or be able to learn very quickly) about the program they are supporting. Especially for a course like this - if I asked the students to write a script that automated a leg rig with IK, but they don’t know how to go about making that un-scripted, then they’ll never be able to script it. You’re right on in thinking that this needs to be an upper-level course.
One thing I did with the students was to write scripts with them. It was a small class (five students), so this was pretty easy. I would say, “We’re going to write a script that does X” and then they would tell me what to script. I would be there to guide them and to make sure it works properly, and also to offer alternative methods for things they were trying to do. This activity was one of the things the students liked most about the class. These times were responsible for many of the light-bulb moments throughout the course.
To sum up, I clearly think that any education that can make tech artists better at what they do is a good idea (or make tech artists out of plain artists!). I’m also very interested to hear the opinions from the community about what would be good topics to cover and where to spend the majority of lecture time.
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