my little one has been watching all of the pixar shorts and i noticed there is an enormous amount of technical artists per short. Does anyone know their roles? Are they all riggers and FX guys? Or do they have a different definition at pixar?
The ‘TD’ role in most film houses is more or less like ‘Technical Artist’ in games-- one business card, many jobs. The one guy I knew there would have been a Technical Animator in the game-speak: he did rigging, partiucularly prodecural effect rigging. From what I saw, they have lots of people working in parallel on a lot of fancy custom deformation and effects work, so ‘rigging’ in their world covers a lot more ground than just providing controls for the animators. A lot of people on the low end of that job are really more like secondary animation staff – they run around after the character animators who do the big gestures, posing and timing and add in things like cloth or muscle or whatnot that the main character animators don’t want to worry about.
Yeah, TD in features is a super ambiguous term.
I’ve only worked about 11months as a TD, but my roles (at R&H and SPI) have comprised:
*Scripting
*Tool and UI building
*PreLighting
*Layout
*Shaders
*Rigs
Add to that, there are TD’s just within pipeline who are in charge of handling Katana, and others for Maya artists etc… It’s a very varied job. Basically when no one thing can describe your position.
And then, places like R&H, everyones a TD. The animators are ANimation TD’s for example…
