So one of the most important things I think we can do on this site is sort of demystify some of the process behind making a game so that not only can you be more educated about what you buy and what goes into it but also so if you decide one day to join this industry you can have some sort of idea about what you may like to do. For the next couple weeks I am going to try to give a little explanation about some of our departments. This week I'd like to discuss Tech Art.
A technical art department is a fairly recent addition at Harmonix. In the past a lot of their duties were placed into other departments entirely. Eventually Warburg was tasked with founding the Department of Man Heat and a whole new career path at Harmonix was born.
A technical artist is essentially one who has a foot in both the coder side of the game and the artist side of the game. A lot of folks may think that a character or an animation or a venue can just sort of be dropped into the game and the code makes it all work but this is very rarely the case. For most game engines these assets need to be "hooked up" so as to behave in the appropriate manner (for instance a character should stand on his legs, not his head and those legs should come out of his hips not his collarbone) and exist in the appropriate places so as not to crash the game.
In some instances a process of putting an asset into the game is very difficult and requires a number of steps done in a very precise manner or else it won't work and the game will crash and then you will get yelled at. That's where a tech artist comes in.
Artists need to be creative. They shouldn't, for the most part, have to go through an overly complicated process to get their work into the game when they should be doing other stuff, like the aforementioned "being creative." Sometimes the best way to streamline this process is for a tech artist to find out where the speed bumps are in process and smooth them out by teaching a class on how a certain thing works so that the artists can more speedily and easily implement their work. Other times the tech artist may understand the process a lot better and it is decided that they should be the ones to implement the work. Finally the tech artists often make calls about what new tools the art team may need that would make their lives easier and reduce reptitive tasks that should be done in code.
One of the cooler parts of tech art is that it is both very technical and very social. It requires a good deal of knowledge about every aspect of the engine but also requires great communication skills. Often times a tech artist translates the needs of the programmers to the artists and vice versa.
I can't say Tech Art is like this everywhere as each game company approaches tech art differently (it is a relatively new field after all and we all have individualized needs.) I can say that if you are looking into careers in the industry, you have a pretty good technical understanding, and you're not afraid to talk to people that you will probably do well in this job almost everywhere.
Glossary
Department of Man Heat- The name of the Tech Art Department's office. So named due to the small area it occupies that is packed to the brim with dudes. Dudes like Warburg.
