Welcome to Tech-Artists.Org, a community for technical artists in videogame and film development. We are dedicated to sharpening the skills of technical artists and animators, creating an evolving repository of information and learning, and increasing the education of regular artists about all things technical.
Please check out our forums for questions and discussion, the Wiki for articles and tutorials, or check out the recent blog posts.
There's been some interest about tech-artists.org swag. We are a proud bunch and we like the world to know what we do, even if they have no idea what we do!
So we're going to open a Spreadshirt.com store to sell t-shirts! But first, we need designs. We will be choosing [b]four[b] designs- two from the 'tech-artists.org' category and two from the 'funny t-shirt' category. Each winner will get a choice of two shirts. We may choose other designs as well- if your design is chosen as a runner-up, you'll get a t-shirt with your design on it.
The tech-artists.org category will need to be a cool looking icon, design, etc., for the site. Something iconic, recognizable, good looking, whatever.
The funny t-shirt category can just be any sort of funny tech-arty t-shirt.
Rules for Entry:
Please submit a jpeg of the design no larger than 1024x1024, posted in
To help members with needs such as this or this, I've set up an IRC channel. Instructions for use:
Download an IRC client, such as mIRC, or if you are using FireFox, ChatZilla. I'd highly recommend ChatZilla if you are an IRC n00b or don't want to set up another program.
Connect to freenode.net server, by typing "/connect irc.freenode.net" in mIRC, or "/attach irc.freenode.net" in ChatZilla.
Join our channel by typing "/join #techart".
That's it! You're now in. Feel free to idle all day and wait around for people.
Adrian Walker: Since you work in the film industry, were there any particular films that inspired you to want to work in that industry?
Jen Bahan: When I was 6 years old, I decided I wanted to become a Disney animator. I created little flip books and I watched programs on PBS for kids learning to draw. My father worked in a public school, and he was able to buy a Commodore 64 at an educator's discount. I started programming little images in BASIC. A few years later, two things happened: Disney opened up MGM studios as an attraction at Disney world, and Commodore came out with their 128 which had better graphics, more haptic input, and the ability use MIDI with my synthesizer.
While on a family vacation to visit MGM studios, I watched from a glass wall as animators integrated computer graphics with cell animation on the final sequences of Beauty and the Beast and the pre-production of... [Read More]
__________________
"Laziness is the foundation of efficiency" - Mr. Deatrick, my old high school bio teacher. A smart man he was.
I was about to take the new issue of Game Developer Magazine into the bathroom, and what do I find but the article by Bronwen Grimes, winner of our Lessons Learned contest. She was published in the February 2009 issue of Game Developer Magazine, with the article titled: Visual Learning: Introducing your tools to the art team (bottom left of the cover). Bronwen made some great art for the article, and revised the entire essay for the magazine, so it is worth reading again.
Thanks to Steve Theodore for helping to make this happen.
Adrian Walker: I keep starting off these interviews with "Tell us about yourself" or a similarly very open ended and broad question. Instead, since you work at a game company I'm going to ask, "What is your favorite videogame of all time and why?"
Jeff Hanna: That would have to be Air Warrior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Warrior). My first exposure to Air Warrior was in 1989 or 1990. Here was this graphical online game that brought together hundreds of people each night to wage virtual air battles. While Doom and Quake always get a lot of recognition for promoting online play and Ultima Online and Everquest get recognition for being early graphical online games, Air Warrior was doing it all years before those games game out. I think the first release of Air Warrior was in 1987. The player community was also... [Read More]
__________________
"Laziness is the foundation of efficiency" - Mr. Deatrick, my old high school bio teacher. A smart man he was.
We'd like to announce the public launch of our Community Scripts Initiative. Trying to explain the CSI is difficult in one post, but the idea is to start a revolution in technical community interaction. Interaction within (between technical people), and without (with users of tools). This is a large task but we have some good people behind it and really good ideas for it.
The feature of the CSI we are launching today is the Community Repositories (click here to access). CR's are like source repositories you can make from your control panel, and are publicly viewable (though only you can check in material, others can create branches- this is a type of Distributed Version Control System and is very popular in open source communities). This is all working and in the coming weeks, remaining bugs will be ironed out and new features added. (... [Read More]
Here are all the entries from all who entered the contest. I enjoy running contests like this, that give something to the larger community- I am sure people will learn lots from reading these essays. Thanks to all who entered!
Kees Rijnen is the owner of Lumonix (www.lumonix.net) and co-founder of Slick Entertainment (www.slickentertainment.com). He is especially well known for his work on PuppetShop, Shader FX, and N+. He recently announced that he is working on a game called Scrap Metal.
------------------------------------------------------------------- Adrian Walker: Could you tell us a bit about yourself?
Kees Rijnen: I started professionally in the industry about 11 years ago at a game company called Digital Infinity in the Netherlands, which later merged with Lost Boys to form Guerrilla Games (Sony - Killzone). I started as a 3d artist doing modeling and texturing and later moved into an animation position. After a few years I moved to Edmonton Canada and worked at... [Read More]
__________________
"Laziness is the foundation of efficiency" - Mr. Deatrick, my old high school bio teacher. A smart man he was.
Tech Artists
