Or I guess a better question is, do artists who have programming skills get higher pay, attention,etc from employers in this field?
I guess I’m curious to the state of the field of digital artists wrt programming.
Great read!
Knowing programming can make them more effective but it is not the job, you want something that your CG Supervisor approves and that looks beautiful in the screen.
There are usually Technical Directors (TD) that work close to the departments and know programming more to help the artists.
That said, some artists can be quite technical and know programming. The tool Houdini which produces FX (simulations for fluid, debris, fire, etc.) usually has a couple of programming wizards. They can be quite good in algorithms / hacking stuff together to make it work well in a scene, but not necessarily software design.
But that's largely why I created the course (at the bottom of the posts). I had a lot of artists asking to learn to code, and it was easier to make the course than to do it 1:1 with each of them.
With regards to pay and attention, people who can code are definitely more stable in regards to their careers. They are more likely to be kept on after projects, and generally have greater demand.
The downside is you'll have less attention than artists. You're not really creating the final imagery, so you're a bit in the background. That means you will be better off in the early and middle parts of a career, but it's harder to make it to the really high end jobs like Visual effects supervisors etc...however that's usually 10-15 years into someones career as an artist, and only for a select few, so it's not really a negative IMHO. Though on the flip side, it's easy to jump to traditional tech roles as well, if you find you are hitting a ceiling.
https://www.jerthorp.com/ is one such well known example.
But some camps have more programming skills than others.
For example, matte painting _tends_ to be more artistic,
where as FX and procedural tends to be more programming.
However, the artistic mindset is still equally important, regardless of how technical you are, its still got to look good.
The question isn't as much do you get higher pay for this, it's more about you can't even do most of the high tier CG work without knowing this style of programming.
Zbrush may be one of the last things where you can just sculpt things, but even that can get really technical really quickly.