Switching Career to Tech Art

Professional
#1

Hello. I’ve put uncategorized to my post because I’ve been looking around this forum and somehow I couldn’t find (or haven’t found) anything related to my concern.

As the title says, I’ve been a Graphic Designer for a year now and my country doesn’t seem to support a Technical Artist career. I’ve been doing researches and practicing my coding, studying basics of python and scripting(melScript), and still doing some art related stuffs. I really wanted to be a TA, but I couldn’t find a job like this here in my country, I wanted to know if there is like some alternative job roles that could be a starting point.

#2

I think most of us here ended up in this role because we were frustrated by repetitive, un-creative, and inefficient work. That’s hardly unique to games – being willing and able to learn whatever it takes to make a job better is useful in a lot of situations and businesses. I did something like this in graphic design before I got into the games business – doing things like photoshop automation, better methods for dealing with images in DTP, that kind of thing.

A lot of tech artists start as production artists , and you might find it easier to get started that way. If you have graphic design and coding skills you should also look into UI and UX – these are areas where it really helps to know how code works, and also they are often very inefficient and ripe for a good tech-art pass on things like efficiency and automation.

I would not worry too much what it says on your business card - if you’re solving problems and making things better in some kind of graphics role, you’re one of us.

#3

I wouldn’t say there is alternatives, there is always a role it’s just companies might not call it a TA.
The issue with TA’s are it’s considered 2 skills and more often than not it’s the whole (Jack of all trades / master of none) issue; It’s very rare to find a TA who have mastered Coding and Art.

I would suggest you work on tools or pipelines to help artists, that’s ultimately what I consider a TA to be, someone who knows enough of the art pipeline to make the job easier for other artist.