I’m a technical artist in my sophomore year of college (currently in college for game development please don’t argue and tell me i should drop out.) I’ve been into game development for about 2 years and have been doing 3D art for longer. Lately I have decided into gearing my portfolio and skillset towards a technical artist career, since I’ve found I like the problem solving aspect of it and I enjoy mixing both programming and art skills.
I have found that my biggest weakness right now is scripting. (visual programming like shader graphs I’m not bad at.) And my biggest strength is rigging. This year I started doing projects aimed at technical art specifically, and here’s what I’ve completed so far:
- Released a full 3D game for a 1 week game jam
- Rigged & animated 2 creature models
- Made 2 stylized toon shaders in Unity (using shader graph)
- Made a procedurally animated beetle in Godot (probably the most difficult project i’ve done)
What other technical art projects do you think would look good in my portfolio and help me learn some technical art fundamentals. Are there any skills specifically that studios might be checking for?
portfolio completely depends on the job you want to do. in double A or indie development you might need to wear multiple hats so branching out to 2 or 3 specialities within techart will be a good thing. i do urge you to pick up more scripting/coding, this will really benefit in the long run where you could maybe optimise and automate some of your processes. using a ui framework like Pyside or something object oriented will be a good way to wrap your head around some comonly used practices.
possibly making more portfolio pieces surrounding a game will be best. in most cases that is where the interest of game companies lie and will be the most prominent job.
also no worries about the gamedevelopment college, i went to gamedevelopment uni as well and solidified the necessary basics for techart and made it easy to get into the industry (+ you get a network of potential future hires/clients/etc. for free )
Sounds good, thanks for the advice, I think with the specialties, I am leaning towards rigging, shaders, and tooling.
I get this type of question often from students. The best advice I could give you is this…
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Stop looking for perfect advice. Your largest obstacle is not going to be lack of information, it is going to be lack of active time spent behind a desk creating and learning. Don’t become an information collector.
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Don’t try to cast so wide a net. There are lots of things that studios might look for and no matter what you do during school you probably won’t have all of them by the time you graduate, and that is normal. Skills accumulate over time. Pick the things that are most compelling to you and go deep on those. Maybe it’s only 1 or 2 specific things, but you will know them well, and can easily branch out later.
Python scripting ability is a really big deal for tech art roles, so if you are weak in that area then I would go all in on learning that, and learning it well, for the next 2 years. If rigging is your strength then open the script editor (assuming you’re using Maya) and figure out how to write a python script that generates FK controls for the joints you have selected. Then try to build a UI tool for it, or another script that generates a spline rig from some selected locators. As a beginner, how you write those things and which tech / libraries you use are just details you can figure out along the way. Making something (and probably a lot of somethings) is the most important thing you can be doing. I got my first job because of some auto-rig tools I had written.
When I was in school, I discovered that changing my major concentration would afford me more electives, and that proper computer science classes would apply towards those electives, so I changed some things around and took several CS classes. Looking back that was probably the single most impactful decision I made during school. It put me so far ahead when I was starting out since there are a lot of Tech Artists who write code, but not as many who really understand it at a deeper level. That may be something to look into, anyways.