I am an Environment Artist, But recently iam mostly focused on both Procedural Environments and shaders. I moving to the tech art side though other studios mentioned the rigging is a mandatory thing. I don’t like to rig characters but my colleague told me you should take care of the rigging part too if you wanna go ahead with it. I am confused about whether he wrong or right. But I don’t wanna mess around with rigging can I go ahead with both environment and shaders? Is that a good idea?
Hi @Beefyhead - Welcome to the forum!
In my opinion, i’d classify rigging as a sub-domain of technical art in the character deformation and articulation space. The same can be said for world art, vfx, shaders etc i.e one isn’t a requirement of the other merely they are different strings on the same instrument 
- to continue with the metaphor, the more strings you can play the broader your range can be. 
Now as for requirements for jobs etc - thats an entirely different matter. Some may require technical specialities in multiple areas or specifically just one. Thats dependent on the job spec. For example if theres a tech-artist job in environment art, I don’t think rigging would be a potential requirement - but again dependent on the job spec. If the job was for a cloth simulation artist, it’s certainly a plus to know character articulation and it may either ask or imply that it’s a plus to know it.
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Thanks, bud for the reply. I guess I should have to learn the basics of rigging. I know the concept but I didn’t work yet. Do you think Maya is a mandatory package? I am a max guy.
Entirely dependent on studio again, I was a Max guy for years before moving to Maya. I would say scripting knowledge such as Python and larger programming languages is more the main stay in the tech-art world. In the end a lot of skills are transferable between packages at this point - core concepts, approaches generally apply everywhere.
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I’d second that as well. It’s probably not super required for every tech art job but you can almost guarantee that at some point you’ll have to do some sort of skinning/rigging job to set something up.
Generally any of the bigger more complex tasks would be delegated to a technical animator but there are lots of low hanging skinning/rigging tasks that I do as a technical artist such as rigging weapons, props etc.
It’s a good skill to have.
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