TAO-Wiki Brainstorm

Hey everyone! :wave:
We are starting to gather/brainstorm ideas and resources for The TAO Wiki.

If you have a favorite GDC talk, book, blog, YouTube channel, and anything that you found useful on your learning journey, it would be great to add it to the Wiki! :nerd_face:

We are gathering ideas about what the Tech Art Wiki should have. :bulb:

We are gathering online/offline resources about Tech Art and related topics (in games and film).

Ideas about what the Wiki should have:

  • Tech Art GDC Video links
  • Tech Art GDC roundtable notes
  • Video Tutorials/YouTube Channels
  • Blogs
  • Websites
  • Books
  • Educational material
  • Academic journal articles

Here are some GDC talks

GDC2017

  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Introduction to Proceduralism’
  • “Technical Artist Bootcamp: A Tech Artist’s Guide to VR”
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Shaders 201: Creating Art with Math’
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Tech Art for Educators’

GDC2018

  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Contributing to Open Source’
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Identifying Technical Art by Its Habits’
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Learning an Established Content Creation Pipeline, Workflow and Codebase’
  • “Technical Artist Bootcamp: Procedural Islands of ‘Dauntless’”
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Production Values: Improving Quality, Longevity and Scalability’
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Rigging with Triangles’
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Shaders 301’
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Zen in the Art of Rigging’

GDC2019

  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Distance Fields and Shader Simulation Tricks’
  • “Technical Artist Bootcamp: Real-Time Cloth Solutions on ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man’”
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Gotta Go Fast: Shader Optimization for Tech Artists’
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: Cementing Your Duct Tape: Turning Hacks into Tools’
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: “Understanding Constraints: A Framework for Tech Art Decision Making” & “Tech Art at Scale: Supporting 2,000 Users”’
  • ‘Technical Artist Bootcamp: The Dual Power of Metanodes in Maya’

‘Super Powering Technical Artists Using Deep Learning’

Shameless plug : https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021806/Art-Direction-Bootcamp-Technical-Art

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IMHO Theodox’s presentation above,along with David Hunt’s GDC Presentation on Modular Procedural Rigging are required viewing for any one pursing rigging.

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Looks like this is the original look and feel of the TAO Wiki
https://web.archive.org/web/20160929224014/http://tech-artists.org/wiki/Main_Page

Production Pipeline Fundamentals for Film and Games

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Designing the User Experience of Game Development Tools

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GDC 2009

  • Technical Art Techniques Panel: Tools and Pipeline

GDC 2010

  • Building A Better Halo With Python: Production Proven Techniques

GDC 2012

  • Giant Toads and Zombie Bears: Technical Art Re-envisioned for Diablo 3

GDC 2013

  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Rapid Prototyping at Double Fine
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Improving Facilitator Skills for Tech Artists
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Galactic Reign, Tools Behind the Procedural Cinematics
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Education in Technical Art
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: The VFX of Diablo
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Python

GDC 2014

  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Intro/Postmortem - Mecanim in Undertakers
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Virtual Camera System
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Halo 4: Content Performance Tips & Techniques
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Hacking MotionBuilder: 10 Things You Aren’t Doing but Should Be!
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Ryse
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: User Experience Design Applied to Technical Art

GDC 2015

  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Proceduralism and Automation at Certain Affinity
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Tech Art in Tamriel: The Elder Scrolls Online’s Character Tools and Pipeline
  • Art Direction Bootcamp : Technical Art Direction
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Nasum Virtualis: A Simple Technique for Reducing Simulator Sickness in Head Mounted VR
  • Tools-Based Rigging in Bungie’s Destiny
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Running the Halo Multiplayer Experience at 60fps: A Technical Art Perspective
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Panel Q&A
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Defense Against the Dark Arts: Budgets and Budget Reporting

GDC 2016

  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Let’s Get Physical - Creative Solutions Throughout the Production Cycle
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Massively Scalable Pipeline Deployment
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Deploying and Maintaining a Unified Toolset Worldwide
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Shaders 101: Foundational Shader Concepts for Tech Artists
  • Technical Artist Bootcamp: Honey, Where is My Wingsuit? - Building the Just Cause 3 Animation and Rigging Pipeline
  • Technical Art Culture of ‘Uncharted 4’

GDC 2017

  • Technical Art Techniques of Naughty Dog: Vertex Shaders and Beyond

GDC 2018

  • Production-Level Facial Performance Capture Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
  • Visual Effects Bootcamp: Zip! Thwack! Ping! Animation Principles of VFX

GDC 2019

  • Super Powering Technical Artists Using Deep Learning
  • Visual Effects Bootcamp: Player Interactions Visualized
  • Interactive Wind and Vegetation in ‘God of War’
  • ML Tutorial Day: Simple Head Pose Estimation for Dialogue Wheels
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A curate list of links of all these would be a great resource!

2 Likes

This whole playlist of videos has been really super helpful for me as a tech artist over the years.

Math For Game Developers:

I made a prototype of the wiki site! :nerd_face:

You can take a look here:

Some of the GDC session links are there.

The site is generated by using Pelican

What do you think? :+1: :-1:

1 Like

cool stuff ! I suspect the most important bit though is going to be a good search function (and, to a lesser extent, google search visibility since that will drive traffic from outside the community)

Using Pelican would let us exercise some editorial control since it’s ultimately a static generator – but is that what we want? or do we want a more traditional anyone-can-edit wiki. The SSG route works ideally for long term archival stuff and is less vulnerable to vandals, the wiki method is more open to collaboration

Curious to hear what people think

We can go with any technology you have in mind. This was just an example of what we can do. This could be hosted under wiki.techart.online or wiki.tech-artists.org
(not sure what domain you plan to use)

With Pelican I was taking into consideration:

  • It is powered by Python
  • Low to No Cost (just a github repo)
  • Seems that you had plans to generate web a site anyway https://techartorg.github.io/

Re: good search function & google search visibility
We can do something like this: https://songhuiming.github.io/pages/2016/03/26/enable-google-local-custom-search-in-pelican-blog/

For google visibility we will generate a sitemap and submit it.

Re: anyone-can-edit wiki
You can edit the static website pages via github built-in editor + automatic site generation on commit.

Example “Improve this page” here:
http://thetoolsmiths.org/codex/glossary/

In any case, if you had another technology in your vision for TAO wiki that is cool! :slight_smile:

What is the “SSG route”? Do you have a wiki framework in mind?

sag just means static site generator --like pelican. Maybe we could figure out how to configure a build action on GitHub that would rerun pelican on commits --that would let people pull, edit, and submit prs but would not have the wild west problems of an open wiki…

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