Here are the compile notes from the three days of roundtables I ran at GDC this year. I’d like to offer my most heartfelt thanks to everyone who attended. You generated some excellent discussions and were very open in sharing your knowledge and ideas with each other. I sincerely hope I have the opportunity to host more TA roundtables for you at future Game Developer Conferences.
You can also download the roundtable notes in Acrobat format here.
What do tech artists do?
- Tools programmers
- Act as an interface or liaison between artists and programmers
- Act as support staff for artists having trouble with in-house or vendor tools
- Triage art asset issues and development system bugs (e.g. the game doesn’t build on my dev kit)
- Design, create, and maintain the art creation pipeline
- Maintain documentation on the art pipeline
- Study artists’ workflows, identify inefficiencies, and create tools to increase productivity
- Work to share technology across projects and/or studios
- Write shaders
- Create R&D artwork to pass through in production pipeline tools
- Validate upgrades to 3rd party software packages and create migration plans
- Train studio artists on new features found in content creation application upgrades
- Beta test upcoming content creation applications so they can understand the impact of the changes on the studio. They can also provide feedback to the vendor on changes/features that would benefit the studio.
How can a Tech Artist identify inefficiencies in the art pipeline?
- Pair up with an artist to work with them and study their habits
- Have an artist work in your focus studies lab for a few days and study what they do.
- Talk to the artists. Are they satisfied? Do they have any ideas to improve the workflow?
How can someone evangelize the idea of Tech Art within their studio?
- Demonstrate the efficiencies a script or tool will provide the studio
- Show quantifiable metrics. Don’t say, “This would probably save some time”, say “In practice this will reduce the time it takes to perform this task by X%”.
- Work with the producer to schedule time for you to create a demonstration tool
- Be dramatic! If you have X amount of time on your schedule to perform a single instance of a task work within that timeframe to create a tool that will let you finish your task by the end of time X. Then, show the tool and explain how actually doing the task was a small percentage of the time and now that task will no longer take X amount of time to complete.
- Go grassroots. Write scripts to help people other than yourself. Get the artists on your side and they will start evangelizing with you.
Should Technical Artists also create game art?
- Not if they are a full time Technical Artist. Their critical path is one of creating tools. Having them try to work in a dual role is a risk.
- Technical Artists should understand the process of making game art though. Creating R&D artwork in the pipeline to validate the tools can create assets for the programmers to test with is a great way to understand the pipeline.
- Non-critical tasks like special F/X or lighting can, depending on the circumstances, be assigned to Technical Art.
How do you schedule a Technical Artist’s time?
- During preproduction they should be designing and creating the pipeline.
- The pipeline should be complete, and hopefully as close to 100% functional as possible by the time the game is green lighted.
- After that the TA discipline should be scheduled as something akin to a support group. While there will always be a need to create a new one-off tool or to find a way to increase efficiency for the most part the TAs should support the artists. They should ensure the artists are working at their peak.
- Non-pipeline work like shaders, game asset monitoring tools (e.g. something to check the memory use of a game asset), etc… could and should be scheduled during production.
How early should a Technical Artist get involved in the production of a game?
- They should have sign-off privileges on early design work. The TAs will understand the technical issues surrounding the creation of art assets necessary to fit the design.
- They should work with the graphic engine programmers as early as possible to identify features and the tools that might be needed to support those features.
- Even before there are 3d modelers on the team there should be TAs doing prototype and R&D artwork.
