[SoleilAbsolu]

Somewhat surprising there is no mention of basic design principles, or understanding the quirks of human perception. My brother was a production artist for some well-known computer games in the '90s-'00s, and continually complained about programmers and managers with zero visual sense, or curiosity about understanding the artists' side.

Graphics aren't my specialty, but as a musician, sound designer and producer, by far the most effective/influential audio DSP coders I'm aware of understand the basics of music, the physics/acoustics of sounds, and the gotchas at the interface between discrete digital processes and how we perceive and interpret stimuli.

[shikshake]

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.

[bsenftner]

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.

[shikshake]

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.

[gambiting]

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.

[doodlesarefun]

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.

[shikshake]

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.

[doodlesarefun]

Thank you!

[tayo42]

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

[harulf]

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.

[thewebguyd]

This applies outside of creative industries too. I've seen my fair share of B2B/enterprise software where its clear the vendor has no clue how the industry they are selling to works, or how the users of that software think.

AI changed the calculus a bit (or at least, it has the potential to) but I think that was a huge part of the whole "learn to code" movement in the mid 2000s, to start treating software development as a "feature, not a product" of existing experts in their field so that the people most familiar with their domain are actually the ones making the software instead of having to translate the requirements down to a dev team.

[mghackerlady]

the learn to code movement was a psyop by big tech to get more javascript monkeys for cheap

[pipes]

I doubt most JavaScript monkeys would have got through their leet code style interview process ! :)

[elzbardico]

Think more code monkeys for enterprise software consultancies, like Accenture, Tata, IBM Global Services, etc.

They needed warm bodies for their projects, as the usual source of manpower was grinding leetcode to work on bigtech at salaries that would make an accenture business type vomit in disgust.

[Atrix256]

(author of the article) 100% agree. As others have said, a good graphics programmer works with tech artists and artists. Frankly, graphics programming is largely a role of service to enable those people to do what they want to do, or help create what they envision. People mentioned Inigo Quilez as an example of a graphics programmer who is also an artist. He is a power house and a unicorn. I personally like playing music / programming audio more, which is a good ground for learning DSP things - useful when for instance, you want to push your rendering noise into the high frequencies, so a low pass filter is more effective at denoising.

[at_compile_time]

>Inigo Quilez

I came across this guy's channel the other day and it was an immediate subscribe.

[milesvp]

I see this all the time with audio too. The amount of bits you need to reserve a