Hey all, I currently work at an animation studio as a junior houdini/pipeline TD.
I love the job itself but as for the projects they don’t interest me much and I’ve always wanted to work in games, I’m particularly interested in the creation of procedural environments and assets. I’m curious as to how involved TAs are in actually creating these tools (like a castle generator or cable generator etc.) or is that something that environment artists are now doing these days? Additionally, I’m wondering how different a Procedural TA’s daily life looks compared to mine, and the skills I might be lacking.
As for what I do now:
- Debugging problematic Houdini scenes
- Creating Python scripts to be used on the pipeline.
- Testing procedural asset HDAs and tooling
- Creating new HDA (nothing crazy, just little utility HDAs)
- Working with USD authoring
From the research I’ve done on existing procedural technical artist job ads and a brief conversation I had with an animation TA the biggest things I seem to need to focus on are
- Solidifying my Houdini knowledge
- Python (I’m still a beginner, I know enough to scrape by)
- Unreal Engine
- 3D math (We were not friends in high school and I feel as though I’m severely lacking on that front)
- Substance Designer (seems like a bonus on most job ads?)
Would love to hear your feedback, I know there’s no one path but I’m trying to get a better sense of what the role looks like and what I may be overlooking.
Thanks everyone!