Any advice for a Software Engineer turned Technical Artist?

Hey community! Haven’t posted much but I read lots of posts on this site, it’s been helping me from stage one on becoming a Tech Artist!

I’m a Technical Artist at a mobile game company, and I’ve been learning a TON. But weaknesses I’ve found hard to overcome are all on the art side. I consider myself artistic, I have experience with Photoshop and Maya, but almost all of my education and experience is in software engineering.

It makes a lot of sense for an artist to say, “Hey how can I make my process go faster?” And start to transition to Technical Art. But for me it was more, “Hey I love art, but I also love programming. How can I do both?” So I was never officially an artist to begin with.

Okay, sorry, long intro. My questions:
Any advice on improving art skills so I can be a more efficient member of the Tech Art team?
What were the best ways animators and riggers learned their craft?
Has anyone out there been in my position?
Most importantly, am I asking the right questions?

Ready to hear some feedback :slight_smile:
Izzy

There’s nothing like doing!

The best way to be a good TA – to be able to really help your artists – is to be enough of a working artist yourself that you can see things through their eyes. That means you need to make stuff (models, animations, effects – you’ll probably have to pick one and stick with it for a while to get useful experience) and most importantly you need to push it all the way to completion.

You don’t have to be a great fine artist – life drawing classes or acting classes are great, but not essential – however you really need to live with some assets from concept through completion, with all the bumps along the road that usually entails: redesigns, bugs, changes of purpose and all the other random stuff that happens in every production. It’s really important to have a goal in sight and push towards the goal, with other people giving you feedback and critiques and all the usual back and forth of doing production art. Without that it’s hard to understand the role of iteration and exploration in art. The cardinal sin of all tools programmers is failing to see that “an efficient description of the finished product” is never the same as “a good system for chasing after the finished product in your head”.

If you can do it, convince your bosses to let you work as a part-time artist for a while. Long enough to really live the life. You’ll probably get the grunt work, and you need to be ready for the usual artistic ego issues. However being a good artist (at least, on a team) is all about learning to live with feedback anyway – it’s a bit rough on the self-image at first but if you can stick it out you’ll really see what your users go through every day. Plus you’ll get a much better sense of what is broken and needs fixing.

Over the long haul it’s great to get experience in all of the big divisions (modelling, environments, animation, and effects) but each one is an art form of its own. Plan on spending a good chunk of time on each.

It’s a ton of work on top of your regular job :slight_smile: But it will make you better, incomparably better, at your job over the long haul.

Plus, it’s fun.

solid advice from Theodox. Couldn’t have said it better! I totally agree that technical artists should have a working knowledge about creating art - that makes us technical “artists”. And yes, you’re asking exactly the right questions! Unfortunately I met quite a few TAs who aren’t really interested in doing art themselves, and I think that’s not good, because there’s the real danger you’ll lose touch with the people you’re supposed to help, and you won’t really understand their needs any more.

Keep your own art projects small - quality over quantity, or else you won’t make much progress, because it’s really a lot of ground to cover.
If you’re not on the artist’s floor, consider moving your desk there. That alone will give you a lot of insight how things work - not just the hands on aspects of creating art, but also about the teamwork and management aspect.

This is just my personal opinion, but as a well rounded TA you should have some knowledge in 3 aspects: art, tech(e.g. programming) and management (e.g. basic project mgmt/producer/art director knowledge). To be really effective, you should be able to look at a problem from all 3 points of view. Knowing how art production actually plays a role in how assets are produced - e.g. production steps, interactions - is also quite important, and something you’ll still miss out when working on an asset alone. In that regard, asking your boss to join an art team, is a good idea!

Theodox & RobertKist, awesome advice! So far I’ve totally asked to do grunt work for the art team in order to improve my skills, they have helped so much, I’ll continue to do that. I’d hate comparing myself to others, but it can be really intimidating to see other TA’s portfolios and all the awesome artwork they’ve done… Because they were artists before. Makes me think I’m missing a big piece of the puzzle-- but that piece might just be practice/experience/doing the art.

Many working artists I’ve met went to school for art. Do you think it’s harder for someone who didn’t go to art school to learn on their own? Or to make a good quality piece worth showing off?

One more thing, on a portfolio, is it mostly things you’ve done on the job or something on your own? Do artists work on a lot of side projects?

Thank you so much for your responses!!! I’m honestly not looking to be the best artist in the world-- so many talented full-time artists are too good. But I’m definitely interested in practicing their processes to be better at my job.

Izzy

90% of what you learn in artschool is how to take and give feedback. Most of the rest you teach yourself anyway. Or, you learn that you can’t teach yourself and that you need a different line of work. Look at things you like, talk about them with other people who appreciate them, and try to achieve something. Work at it. Be restless. Don’t worry about credentials, or even how good you’ll end up: the only thing that matters is being better tomorrow than yesterday.

I think I should amend my post. When you work on your own art, don’t worry too much about artistic quality. Artistic quality is about getting shapes, volumes, shading right - making sure the asset “looks” good. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to give your best, but the sort of quality that is often ignored by regular artists is technical quality, or the craftsmanship. i.e. that an asset doesn’t just look good, but that it is, indeed, overall a good and solid asset.

Smaller assets let you focus more on this aspect of the work.
Many tools you’ll be developing will support artists in achieving higher quality of craftsmanship. e.g. better edgeloops, better normal maps, less intrusive tools and more intuitive use of tools (UX comes into play here - having working on assets yourself will help with this a lot!).

About portfolio: I don’t think there’s ONE approach that works for every TA. It really depends on your specialization. And personally, while nice art impresses me, a TA folio full of art will not get you hired. I consider having some art pieces in the folio a bonus, but even there I look more for craftsmanship (if you’re nice enough to supply maps and wireframes) and for “what” you did. e.g. a concept drawing is less useful for me than a rigged character, or a PBR textured asset, or if you’re able to take your work into a game engine and present it there.

Since you’re a SW engineer, one thing I value a LOT is if people can apply good software engineering principles at their work. This is something difficult for many TAs because they either don’t have the training or awareness to do so (maybe because they come from an art background). Yet with tools and pipelines becoming more complex, it really pays off to have team members with such knowledge. Rob Galanakis is a good example of a TA who cares about this and who makes strong points for the needs of those skills in his blog. If you make a folio, you should definitely try to somehow convey these skills!

Hmm… I’m not sure what I would consider my specialization. I’m definitely more programming centric but I’m trying to branch out. One of my past coworkers I talked to said a good TA would have a sort of pyramid structure in skills. Perhaps you’re most specialized in one area, maybe rigging, tools, or shaders, and then proficient in others. One would cover their bases. I guess I’m aiming for that. I don’t feel very tech-arty just being good at programming. So would my portfolio perhaps contain scripts I’ve written?

It all definitely comes down to just learn by doing. What about progress on other areas I’m working on? Like if I’m doing basic rigging…

[QUOTE=isabellc;26506]Hmm… I’m not sure what I would consider my specialization. I’m definitely more programming centric but I’m trying to branch out. One of my past coworkers I talked to said a good TA would have a sort of pyramid structure in skills. Perhaps you’re most specialized in one area, maybe rigging, tools, or shaders, and then proficient in others. One would cover their bases. I guess I’m aiming for that. I don’t feel very tech-arty just being good at programming. So would my portfolio perhaps contain scripts I’ve written?

It all definitely comes down to just learn by doing. What about progress on other areas I’m working on? Like if I’m doing basic rigging…[/QUOTE]

your co-worker is right. you should have a wide range of knowledge, and I think that’s the best basis for specializing. If I were you, I would not worry about specialization. For example, many TAs joining my team join as generalists. Eventually they find some aspect of work where they’re especially skilled, or that interests them the most - that’s where they specialize in. Some people know right away where they want to go, for others it can take much longer. Maybe don’t think of it as a mountain with 1 “top skill” but maybe more like a mountain range. In the end, you cannot be awesome at everything - rigging. FX, scripting, shaders, UE4, Unity - for that the field is too big. But you can surely by really good at a few of them - in fact brining two knowledge areas together may often be more useful than being really good in just one.

Some great advice in this thread so far!

As someone coming from the other side (art > tech art), it’s interesting hearing the perspective from somone like yourself :slight_smile: To echo some earlier advice: Do some “grunt” assets from start to finish to get a feel for the process and maybe perhaps move onto more complex assets which involve more advanced techniques.

One thing I’ve been able to do is just to watch how the other artist works in our team (there is only him and I), and ask him about his process. Another interesting observation is how he interacts with the game engines we use (Unity and Unreal Engine 4) and it’s given me some great inspiration for tools/UI.

You are certainly asking the right questions! You seem to be on the right track.

Sad but I guess, true. I’m excited to learn about all of those areas, but thinning myself out too much could also be detrimental. That’s a relief to know lots of generalist TA’s you know get hired. Like you said, for now I’ll stick to being “general” just because I don’t want to pigeon-hole myself into one area too early.

Thank you so much for coming back to this post and discussing with me! :smiley:

teessider: Totally! I’ve met many artists->TA’s and it’s fantastic as an engineer to meet someone from an art background have an interest in programming. (I had to go to school to learn, and some of the best TA’s I know went to art school, or no college at all! Amazing!!) Thinking about it, you absolutely learn programming the best by doing, too… Maybe art and coding aren’t so different after all :slight_smile: Good idea just watching other artists, I should do that more often. My art coworkers are always happy to give me advice.

In the end, do you really feel like you’re a master at anything? Do you think game companies expect you to be? It’s like that quote, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”

I feel like I ‘master’ something whenever required. When you are being a strong generalist and maintain your foundation, you cam much faster learn the necessary things to solve a certain problem.
I never really chose to be a generalist, but my way of learning and doing problem solving as grew me into that.

As far as I have seen, real specialization comes from trying + current situation and demand + interest

But I don’t see why you could never pivot your own specialization into something. You only have one life, so you better do what you love doing :smiley:

[QUOTE=Nysuatro;26531]I feel like I ‘master’ something whenever required. When you are being a strong generalist and maintain your foundation, you cam much faster learn the necessary things to solve a certain problem.
I never really chose to be a generalist, but my way of learning and doing problem solving as grew me into that.

As far as I have seen, real specialization comes from trying + current situation and demand + interest

But I don’t see why you could never pivot your own specialization into something. You only have one life, so you better do what you love doing :D[/QUOTE]

Lol, I love learning stuff! Good thing Tech Art is all about that life. :smiley: I may or may not start posting terrible rigs on tech-art.org just to get some feedback from you guys. Sincerely appreciate everyones’ advice!

Hey isabellc! im just doing the opposite, im a 3d artist trying to turn out as a Technical Artist, i hope we all can learn from each other!

Hey chiniara, yeah totally! :smiley: I’m working on a project to concept -> model -> rig/animate a character. I’ll have to post my artist n00by progress, I’d love your and the community’s feedback.