I mean, the daily tasks are “somewhat” different, but at the end of the day we are all using maxscript, pymel, python and c# to create tools to work with visual data. Why sometimes is it so hard for a technical animator to be considered for a technical artist position and vice versa?
I understand the gap between a character TD and a pipeline TD in VFX might be slightly bigger than in games, but even so I don’t find it justifiable to discard someone for a position purely on a different “title”. And I bet many Tech Artists and Tech Animators end up sometimes helping each other in many studios, at least I was never purely working with either one or the other.
I think the line between ‘tools maker’ and ‘content creator’ is fuzzier for people with ‘technical animator’ on their business cards – they are often folks who do animation in code ( managing state machines and blend graphs) or using simulation tools, although of course many folks labelled ‘technical animator’ are really riggers.
++ on the titles being a bad guide, especially in games the titles are often very hard to compare between companies.
I’d also say that “tech animator” is more a tech artist who specializes in animation tools. Where as a “tech artist” may create a many different types of art tools, which may reside outside of just animation.
I’d echo what Shawn says here. My official title at the studio is a Technical Artist but my focus and specialization happens to be most of the disciplines that touch animation. So, internally I am one of several Technical Animators that focus on these related areas. While we all are capable of writing tools and scripts in various languages, most of these tools are specifically related to characters, rigging, and animation of course. Additionally, I have an animation background, while not everyone does, that may perhaps make myself more capable to tackle the areas that Steve has mentioned above. Doing actual production work outside of tools and support tasks may help distinguish the role as well. The title is a bit fuzzy as from most of the job postings that are out there it can vary between the needs of the studios and how internally the teams may want to define the role. I think my familiarity with most areas of game development would allow me to become a TA generalist but that wouldn’t necessarily be the best use of my skills. I have the same feelings on animation programmers. The guys I work with could very well handle many areas of game programming but they have so much knowledge in the area of animation it would be a huge loss to see them shuffled to a different focus.
Where I have worked, the animation pipelines are so complex that the “tech animators” are devoted solely to understanding, expanding, and working in, the animation pipeline. The other “tech artists” deal with everything else - models, FX, shaders, textures, etc…