The creatives in the game industry or similar industries like mobile, tools, gambling, all tend wrestle with middle muck detailed problems to solve. We have artists, developers and support in the middle that no one in management knows what they do. I like to call Technical Artist the middle child of the creative family. The middle child that deals with problems that neither an artist, nor a software developers frankly want to deal with. Sometimes the schedule does not allow for bandwidth of a DEV or Artist time to deal with finding a solution. In comes the Technical Artist, problem solvers for both art and code. Technical artist tend to create solutions or prove the best know solutions where artist/animators and developers tend argue blame towards one another. They work on obsession to find solutions vs. obsession on the problem. My team of 12 TA's are all comprised of 1/2 Artist generalist motion mechanic, optimization problem solvers, and the other 1/2 are focused on code, platform, compression, and bug tool solutions. It is this teams business to make the artists, animators or developers look good, ultimately the keeper of creative artistic vision and game production flowing. Technical artist make room animators/artists to focus on art without technical worries of engineering handoff of asset on the flip-side the technical artist carries the artist vision into code mechanics so that the engineers does not dumb down original artist intent. When an engineer need. to identify trouble spots in the architecture of the game (non code related, i.e. baked in animations, alpha artifacts,etc...) Tech artist can identify, pinpoint, prescribe the fix to where the engineer is limited. When something goes haywire or looks broken, especailly during a high-presure deadlines, then call in the technical artist to troubleshoot, identify, and provide creative options for the whole creative family. -Chuck
So not necessarily making content in the game but writing the tools for other people to use to create content for the game. Interesting. What I'm getting out of Technical Artists or Technical Art Director is that they are a special medium where they bridge the gap between the Artists and the Engineers in a sense, which also requires someone with very strong set of skills to begin with.
I used to be in pipeline within the animation industry, making tools. I swapped out to becoming a rigging TD because of what Rob talks about at 1:28. Got frustrating to be at the end of the credits list on every project, know how to do a lot of the things that were "artistic" but be disregarded or not listened to when bringing up concerns, etc. Basically I joined the other side 😅, but my experience was invaluable and I will always praise the work of pipeline and technical artists who's work often goes unsung.
+Sean Lake Hi Sean, A character setup artist has more of a specific focus in setup, one could apply that term to a technical artist. The difference is that technical artist loves to do setup, fix art and code problems in general. The character setup artist either loves rigging or working IDE (integrated development environment) that sets up the character. The game industry has this dilemma of describing what a TA is or does. Professionally if you were build a house the TA would be likened a Drafter. Producers call them generalist, engineers call them support, artists at my work call them names I can't say. Back in the old-school 2D animation ink days they called them inbetweeners. As art and science technologies advance the name recently evolved with Technical Artist. ( it's probably easier to explain than dude that does technical stuff + Art stuff +code stuff.) -Chuck
Chuck Schotborgh Hey Chuck!. Yeah, it was sort of dropped in on our laps AFTER we were starting character rigging that there only exists TD's and that Character riggers don't really exist. Which I don't know how that is possible. It seems that they are pressing coding more than just rigging. I LOVE rigging, but am not the worlds best coder, so i stopped pursuing rigging as a discipline. Don't get me wrong, I am slowly learning python/pymel, but I need to be job ready now. I'm an old fart who doesn't have many years left so I'd love to get in my career before I need a walker.
@@Luxalpa Yap, I do VFX and complex shaders along with various tools and optimizations. Also, vertex animated static meshes are popular these days, so I deal with converting/baking skeletal meshes to vertex animated static ones, etc. And most of the procedural generation stuff.
The creatives in the game industry or similar industries like mobile, tools, gambling, all tend wrestle with middle muck detailed problems to solve. We have artists, developers and support in the middle that no one in management knows what they do.
I like to call Technical Artist the middle child of the creative family. The middle child that deals with problems that neither an artist, nor a software developers frankly want to deal with. Sometimes the schedule does not allow for bandwidth of a DEV or Artist time to deal with finding a solution. In comes the Technical Artist, problem solvers for both art and code.
Technical artist tend to create solutions or prove the best know solutions where artist/animators and developers tend argue blame towards one another. They work on obsession to find solutions vs. obsession on the problem.
My team of 12 TA's are all comprised of 1/2 Artist generalist motion mechanic, optimization problem solvers, and the other 1/2 are focused on code, platform, compression, and bug tool solutions. It is this teams business to make the artists,
animators or developers look good, ultimately the keeper of creative artistic vision and game production flowing.
Technical artist make room animators/artists to focus on art without technical worries of engineering handoff of asset on the flip-side the technical artist carries the artist vision into code mechanics so that the engineers does not dumb down original artist intent. When an engineer need. to identify trouble spots in the architecture of the game (non code related, i.e. baked in animations, alpha artifacts,etc...) Tech artist can identify, pinpoint, prescribe the fix to where the engineer is limited.
When something goes haywire or looks broken, especailly during a high-presure deadlines, then call in the technical artist to troubleshoot, identify, and provide creative options for the whole creative family. -Chuck
So not necessarily making content in the game but writing the tools for other people to use to create content for the game. Interesting. What I'm getting out of Technical Artists or Technical Art Director is that they are a special medium where they bridge the gap between the Artists and the Engineers in a sense, which also requires someone with very strong set of skills to begin with.
I used to be in pipeline within the animation industry, making tools. I swapped out to becoming a rigging TD because of what Rob talks about at 1:28. Got frustrating to be at the end of the credits list on every project, know how to do a lot of the things that were "artistic" but be disregarded or not listened to when bringing up concerns, etc.
Basically I joined the other side 😅, but my experience was invaluable and I will always praise the work of pipeline and technical artists who's work often goes unsung.
This was amazing insight! Thank you so much.
Great answers!
I am attending college to become a technical artist. This video was very informative. Thanks for the upload!
How is it going? :>
so what is the difference of a technical artist and a character setup artist?
+Sean Lake
Hi Sean,
A character setup artist has more of a specific focus in setup, one could apply that term to a technical artist.
The difference is that technical artist loves to do setup, fix art and code problems in general. The character setup artist either loves rigging or working IDE (integrated development environment) that sets up the character.
The game industry has this dilemma of describing what a TA is or does. Professionally if you were build a house the TA would be likened a Drafter. Producers call them generalist, engineers call them support, artists at my work call them names I can't say.
Back in the old-school 2D animation ink days they called them inbetweeners.
As art and science technologies advance the name recently evolved with Technical Artist. ( it's probably easier to explain than dude that does technical stuff + Art stuff +code stuff.) -Chuck
Chuck Schotborgh Hey Chuck!. Yeah, it was sort of dropped in on our laps AFTER we were starting character rigging that there only exists TD's and that Character riggers don't really exist. Which I don't know how that is possible.
It seems that they are pressing coding more than just rigging. I LOVE rigging, but am not the worlds best coder, so i stopped pursuing rigging as a discipline. Don't get me wrong, I am slowly learning python/pymel, but I need to be job ready now. I'm an old fart who doesn't have many years left so I'd love to get in my career before I need a walker.
I'm a technical artist and lots of what I do ends up in the game.
hey bro i'm studying game design i want to be a technical artist can you give your insta id i have some doubts....plz
how so? do you mean your rigging assets?
@@brandonbudidjaja9440 I imagine they're talking about shaders, particle effects, explosions, etc.
@@Luxalpa Yap, I do VFX and complex shaders along with various tools and optimizations. Also, vertex animated static meshes are popular these days, so I deal with converting/baking skeletal meshes to vertex animated static ones, etc. And most of the procedural generation stuff.
thanks for this very helpful!