I was just going through the tech-artists.org group on linkedin, and one thing that’s always made me wonder is, the amount of members we have who are working in India. Sure, we see a post once in a while, but it is quite a large amount. I’d like to hear from you guys.
From us in the west, our opinion (usually based on experience) is something along the lines of, outsourcer studios are technically incompetent. So we have very little insight into the technical community there (which I know exists because you guys exist- I’ve met some of you!). Where are you working? What are you working on? How do you view your outsourcing studios? How do you view the TA community in the west?
I’d also love to hear from anyone outside of the Western TA community, but India in particular interests me, because there seems to be a ton of TAO members here, but few posts (and I’ve met many more TA’s in China and understand its video game industry more- India is a black box to me).
Hi Rob.
I appreciate your interest in TA community in India. I was working in a gaming studio in India and currently moving on to China. I have worked with some outsourcing studios and from my point of view western studios are technically advance than us here. My work was to keep our artist technical updated, but I say we have very good and great artist here though they are technically weak. The studios in India are small outsourcing setups and the TA’s miss the experience of end-to-end game development. But I was lucky enough to work on a game from start to end, during which tech-art forums were very helpful.
I am a little jealous about the TA Community in the west:D:. You have many great and good people who are very helpful like Bobo, Ben, Paul, Denis and you(for this great site) and the TA Meet-ups. I was not able to attend or meet anyone, but looking forward to meet many in the future.
Thanks a lot for rolling out this thread and your interest in Indian tech-art community .Yes your are right games industry in India is basically outsourcing based and technically incompetent in some way.Like Akram said and if i am not wrong we are few years behind western as well as some Asian countries in Game development Domain.Apart form Game Art “thanks to outsourcing” :): what I think is we need to take one big leap at a time to keep up with the pace of international industry in-term of core game dev technologies and Technical Art.and this is where awesome forum like tech-art.org that is providing a platform for people like me to acquaint with the latest Tech-art knowledge come in to play.I work as a 3d Artist for Indie Game Development studio here in India and this forum mostly tru IRC channel has helped me in learning and writing scripts/tools for our In house Game Engine which otherwise could have been a tedious task for our sole programmer to invest some time in building these tools for Artist which is my job now and I am loving it thanks to tech-art.org :):
and for tons of members on linkedin group ,in India social networking and similar sites are very popular and few people join them just like that without knowing a thing or two about the group or community in there. I guess that might be the reason its just my point of view :):
Usually, R&D department can be found only in big ‘production’ studios, who keep on updating their production pipeline tools, write new renderman shaders to decrease render time, etc. They do have very talented Technical Artists, but somehow we don’t work as a community.
Gaming courses is relatively very new in urban India. Even now I can’t remember someone offering ‘Technical Art’ courses. Technical is something we learn online from forums & blogs.
Personally, having been ‘artist’ converted to ‘technical art’, I need to keep on updating my programming & mathematical skills. So, I still learn a lot of ‘new’ things from forums, etc.
Since my company does its own game development, I have no idea how the outsourcing process works. However, we have partnered with Digital Domain for development of “Bruce Lee: The Dragon Warrior” where all 3d assets are done by our team. I was the technical artist for that game from our side, and the process was very smooth.
However, I do have plans to create my own website soon & share personal scripts.