TechArt Resources

Professional
#1

I wanted to start a thread where people could post links to sites with useful information related to the TechArt discipline. I’m thinking that this should be restricted to more general information useful to technical artists, as opposed to specifics, such as Eric’s really useful normal mapping wiki. But of course it’s up to the community to decide.

This is a good example of the type of information I’m thinking of…
The Keeper of the Pipe - Creating an art pipeline by Ross Patel.
Games industry technical notes - a general Tech Art wiki by Rick Stirling.

Collections of presentations and graphics papers:
Microsoft XNA Developer Presentations
GDCTV
Siggraph papers

Older articles, but still valuable:
Growing a Dedicated Tools Programming Team
Tool Postmortem: Climax Brighton’s Supertools
Beautiful, Yet Friendly

And of course the Tech Art Wiki.

#2

I found this one interesting:
Animation Pipelines in Python, and the Linux Kernel: Woot!

Actually there’s a lot of good tidbits on the o’reilly site.

#3

I listen in on a couple game graphics programmer email lists, some great gems pop up now and then, and it helps my art-leaning brain to stay in synch with the coders. They also have searchable archives.
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gdalgorithms-list - probably the best signal/noise ratio, as far as art-related coding.
http://lists.midnightryder.com/listinfo.cgi/sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com
http://discussms.hosting.lsoft.com/SCRIPTS/WA-MSD.EXE?A0=DIRECTXDEV

edit… forgot to say, cool thread idea. I’m always interested in links to learning resources other TA’s find useful.

#4

Cool lists Eric, thanks. Being in the UDN mailing list under most everything always keeps my brain in a frenzy and my inbox full, and I’ve seen a lot of graphics related queries that have some great breakdowns and snippets for the engine.

#5

For Maya Guys:

Bryan Ewerts’ Maya: MEL and API

and one of my all time favs:
Rob The Bloke (Maya API)

#6

http://www.jeff-hanna.com/

Jeff is a genius

#7

SIGGRAPH 2007 Maxis Sketches
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ajw/s2007/
[ul]
[li]Player-Driven Procedural Texturing
[/li][li]Creating Spherical Worlds
[/li][li]Fast Object Distribution
[/li][li]Rigblocks: Player-Deformable Objects
[/li][/ul]

#8

Not sure if MAXScripter pages belong in here, but came across Jim’s site again today, Paul’s site too. Great sites for animators.

Jim Jagger’s MAXScripts
http://www.jimjagger.com/Pages/Tools/JJTools_Complete2009.htm

Paul Hormis’ MAXScripts
http://www.hyperent.com/Hyp-Maxscripts.php

#9

Pixar On-Line Library

If you ever wanted to read the original Cook-Torrence paper, here it be, along with tons of other cool stuff. Might not be able to implement any of these papers “as-is”, but could provide some good jumping off points.

#10

A nice page of free, online Python books.

http://www.coderholic.com/free-python-programming-books/

#11

Chapter1, the Lore of the TD’s, by Tony Apodaca. given at a Siggraph 2002 course, Renderman in Production

good (readable!!) overall introduction to graphics math

#12

[QUOTE=Dave Buchhofer;1072]Chapter1, the Lore of the TD’s, by Tony Apodaca. given at a Siggraph 2002 course, Renderman in Production

good (readable!!) overall introduction to graphics math[/QUOTE]

Nice read! I’d also recommend Bobo’s “The Matrix Explained” Maxscript DVD. He explains vector and matrix math in a nice visual, easy to understand way. It is related to maxscript, but I think all the concepts he covers are translatable to other applications.

#13

+1 for Bobo’s DVD. I enjoyed that a lot, albeit it goes over my head quite a bit towards the end, which is not a bad thing. I’ll get there eventually :slight_smile:

I came across this, thought it was interesting:
A few lectures from Stanford by Professor Jerry Cain.
It is addressed to programmers new to Python but it builds quite a bit and goes into a lot of the behind the scenes stuff that will get you if you are used to other languages, so I thought this might come in handy for someone here. The last lecture goes over XML parsing.



and the page for the class to get the assignments and hand-outs (the link on the youtube page is broken ) :
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs107/

#14

Actually if you like lectures on programming, the google IO series is great:

The “Python for Proficient Programmers” lecture is very succinct, as well as things like Ruby scripting for Sketchup and so on.

#15

Here’s another good dvd that covers some good 3d maths, Autodesk Maya Techniques: Bi-Directional Constraining Part I. I went to the masterclass the year it was presented and the first part really was just a great overview of 3d math in general and then a little discussion of Maya’s weird transform stacks. Even shows you how to build a constraint by hand, ICE style:D:

#16

Yes my friend Tim Naylor and Andrea gave that masterclass, its a great class and they are lots of fun to watch and learn from…

so … seconding that class.

#17

A very interesting blog by Jim Armstrong:

It’s Flash/Flex focused, but a large portion of the posts are about application of maths to graphics, which is fairly easy to convert to other languages.

#18

Don’t forget Hamish’s zooTools:

http://www.macaronikazoo.com/

Been using them again lately.

#19

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