Building a case for a dedicated Tools Developer

Professional
#1

I’m beginning the process of building a two part case to present to the powers that be at my studio. For part one of the case I mean to argue that our studio needs a full-time DCC tools developer on staff. For part two of the case, I hope to convince my employers that I’m the right individual for the job. :):

Regarding part one, to date the studio has relied on marginal tools development (and effectively non-existent support) from members of the rigging department on an “as we get spare cycles” basis. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the tools development that occurs within this context is self serving. So, the rigging department has good tools, but the modeling and animation departments have effectively no tools support. Since I’ve been at the studio, we’ve grown from ~60 developers to a team of over 220 developers. In my view, this growth has made tools development more feasible and more necessary than ever. We’ve reached a point, I think, where not having a dedicated tools developer is holding back the studio’s ability to produce content optimally.

As for part two of the case, officially I’m a Sr. Tech Artist on the rigging team. However for the past few years, I’ve also been the fractional time, principal “tools guy” at the studio. During this time, I’ve built a number of systems and tools that the studio relies on. This work includes our character export pipeline, a custom character rig referencing system for 3DS Max, a slew of rigging tools and a handful of tools for our artists. My passion is creating systems and tools that better support content creators, and I see so much opportunity to provide better, more efficient tools and workflows to our artists.

I know that we’ve got some accomplished folks in this community (including some stellar tools developers). I would appreciate any thoughts that you might have on this subject, particularly on the value/necessity of having dedicated tools developers on the team.

#2

The details will vary from studio to studio, but the fundamental equation is always the same: (( $/hr of artist cost * # of artists) - time savings ) / $tools dev salary. If people are wasting time on bullshit tasks they are also wasting money. It’s particularly true if the tasks are purely meaningless rote jobs – format conversions, applying conventions that can only break, or making sure that a bunch of files all point correctly at each other. With a 200 person team you must be supporting something north of 75 artists – that’s between $20,000 and $30,000 per day for most budgets, so maybe $4-5 million per year. If you could increase artist throughput by 10% that’s $400,000 per year of additional value (or, to put it another way, 4-5 more artists!) What’s a tools dev salary compared to that?

The logical pushback is, where does that 10% come from? It helps to be able to point out specifics, particularly tasks where a person is doing something that only serves the needs of the machine (is that texture in the right DDS format? Is that collision hull watertight? Does the name of the material match the name of the model as it should?) instead of tasks that need artistic judgement and insight.

Lastly, this is a very conservative estimate because it doesn’t include the quality benefits that come from better iteration time. If an artist can make things 50% faster they won’t spend all that time on making more things: they’ll spend a lot of it making the things they complete better – which has far more payoff for the franchise in the long run.

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#3

Thanks for the sagely insight, Steve. I’ve always found your input to be invaluable, and I feel honored to get to hear your take in the matter. : )

Of course you’re dead on. Not to generalize too much, but the brass are often naturally going to respond best to dollars and cents-centric arguments.