Tech art census?

Hey everyone, I’m starting to put together a survey for a Tech Art Census. I’m wondering what sort of things you’d want to know about TA’s, and I’m looking for volunteers for editing and reviewing the survey (I want to make sure it isn’t crap).

I’m curious about is how TAs in other companies spend their work - e.g. support, tools coding, VFX, rigging. - i.e. what do you primarily do at work?
How many TAs per artist would also be an interesting number to know.

Split out TAs per artist for animation and other stuff. I’d bet the ratios are very different.

Other interesting q’s:

  • Have you ever been a production artist? If so, for how long? Which discipline (animation, environment, modeling…?)
  • How much art training?
  • How much comp sci / programming training?
  • Which packages do you know at professional level?
  • Which do you know at hobbyist level?
  • Which scripting languages?
  • Which compiled languages?
  • Do you report to art or engineering? Or to something else?

I’d be happy to volunteer for this. I’m really interested too - especially to see what people class themselves as depending on their role and well as covering generalist and specialist TAs. :slight_smile:

Do you want to do the survey using Survey Monkey? I installed a surveying tool at work on the Forums, having this on the site would give us complete control over the data.

i second theodox, there needs to be a split between the animation side and the tools/etc side. I also like the idea to see where the transition came from, were you art then TA or prog then TA? or something else entirely?

Which dept causes you the most frustration? artists, designers, programmers, direction, etc? That may be too specific to games, but Im sure film has similar departments.

If you split this up then consider that there are many TAs in smaller shops which do tools coding + animation + whatever else. They may have a hard time saying “I’m a tools coder” or “I’m a rigging TD”. Maybe make some skippable sections in the survey and a general question “as what do you see yourself? tools-coder: 1 - 10, rigger; 1 - 10, VFX artist: 1 -10”. e.g. if you don’t do VFX just set the value to 1 and skip the VFX specific questions.

Roles aren’t mutually exclusive, but it’d be nice to see which ones are common and which not.

It’d be interesting to see what industries people are working in also. We tend to assume games and film, but I’ve noticed recently that companies like Amazon, Google, and Intel to name a few are putting up job postings for positions that very much read like Tech Art want ads…we’re taking over the world.

Butters, I was going to use SurveyMonkey- you have a better option you are saying?

I would love to hear more about other industries where technical artist work ( like seth mentioned)
I was doing some research on data visualisation, and I had the feeling they sounded a lot like tech artists …

I would love to hear some questions about teaching :

  • Who spends time and how much on giving workshops at their company ?
  • Is someone in your team assigned to keeping your whole team up to date with knowledge about a specific topic ( like for example python )
  • How much support is there for education (sending people to conferences, books, courses, … )

I’m curious to know the following:

  • How much tools development is actively pursued at everyone’s place of work?
  • How many people have split responsibilities between tech art and other art related tasks?
  • On average, how much of your work day is spent developing, and how much is spent supporting others?

I like RobertKist’s idea of a 1 - 10 scale of “With what do you most identify” or “Where do you spend your time?” between rigging, tools, vfx, art, animation, etc.

I’m wondering how many people use their skills to parse and visualize data, like parsing a build’s logs and visualizing that in a way useful to a producer.

So, this didn’t happen? Is there any chance for it to happen?

I would be REALLY interested in the “How many TAs per artist” question, specially to show my boss. :p:

Maybe it could be divided in 4 sections, a general one, and other 3 specific for each industry (games/realtime, vfx/pre-vis, science/visualization).

It hasn’t happened yet, I just had a kid in November but holidays are over and I’m back to work so now it’s time to get back to TAO stuff too :slight_smile: I don’t know when this will happen- a good survey needs lots of polish and polished volunteer projects are notoriously vaporous- but I do hope to be able to show progress within a few weeks.