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Comment by shikshake | Hacker News Reader

There’s a separate role that is more along the lines of what you’re saying, called a Technical Artist (that’s what I do)

I think graphics programmers benefit from having an artistic mindset, but they usually work so low level that it isn’t necessary to be successful.

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I was a technical artist for a series of feature films during the early '00s. At a good studio they'll have art and design classes for the tech origin staff and scripting and bash classes for the art origin staff. I was both, and that was a ton of fun.

Sounds like great growth opportunities. This is my first job and I work in a small studio, I really wish I had mentorship and training like that.

Exactly, Technical Artist is a distinct position that normally bridges the gap between pure programmers and artists and their needs. All TAs I've ever worked with had this incredible skill of knowing exactly what tech thing they need to achieve the outcome that the artists want.

Any suggestion for paths into tech art? I'm very strong in traditional media, I know my way around photoshop & blender very well[0] and I've self-studied programming to a level where I can read lower-level (c/c++) code and know what it's doing. I even got a PR merged into blender once!

But I have no industry connection and my public portfolio is mostly charcoal and oil. The company that flew my drone animations is small & didn't get good video of them (there's a cellphone video or two from the audience, but that's not very good for a showreel). I've been thinking of just getting some good footage of a field & using blender to render & composite the designs, but doing that well will be time consuming and I feel like I might be better off doing something else.

Any advice on breaking in?

[0] I made a small blender workflow & add-on before AI to coordinate droneshow animations that I was selling to a small company, used renderdoc to insert gl.readcolors into the renderloop in a very ugly so I could get the benefit of the shader engine, which no commercial drone-animation software could do at the time. Almost worked for a bigger drone company but the contract was untenable.

If you're asking for video games/creative studios, unfortunately my best advice is have good connections and a strong public portfolio. Both of these are solvable problems.

Your skills aren't immediately applicable to a tech artist role. You need to learn about the graphics pipeline (high-level) and how 3D models and particle effects are rendered behind the scenes, plus knowing specific tricks for rendering different common visual effects. You can learn all of this from free online resources.

Thank you!

Is this a viable field for employment?or did it collapse like alot of other digital art?

Good Technical Artists are one of the most sought after professions in game dev. But it's also an annoyingly broad role that means different specific things at different places. The one common trait is being able to bridge the gap between art and code in a way that makes both parties happy.

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