What do tech artist paths often look like in postsecondary school?

I overheard our lead rendering programmer discuss interview candidates who had been through indusrty schools like Full Sail or Digipen. Paraphrasing, he said:

“The ones who come from schools will have a certain set of skills, but you can just coast through most school. I’ll take the person who taught themselves to program graphics in thier bedroom, just because they were curious. Because you know they have both the the intelligence the tenacity to figure stuff out.”

Broadly speaking Techart breaks down into:

  • Rigging & skinning
  • Art / Anim tool and UI programming
  • Art / Anim pipeline tools
  • Shader & Render programming
  • Animation programming

Specializing in any one of these areas can help narrow down your choices -and makes you hirable. So my first advice would be to think about which area you have the most active curiosity about.

Most Programming and Math resources online are not directed at games or computer graphics specifically, so get used to adding “…for games”, “…for animation” or “…for graphics” to your google & you tube searches. I still use “…tutorial for beginners” after years on the job :slight_smile:

Some on the job self teaching things I have done:

  • posting here
  • vector math at Kahn Academy
  • matrix math via various you tube videos and old game dev FAQs
  • linear algebra from “for dummies” pdfs
  • tool and ui programming from this forum, Yasin Uludag’s you tube
  • python for Maya from Maya Python for Games and Film & Practical Maya Python
  • c / c++ from Casey Muratori( Hand Made Hero) and Caleb Curry You tube videos
  • MS Visual Studio C++ Maya plugin from Cult of Rig
  • Java Script for Adobe crap from various blogs and forums

The pool is wide and deep. Specializing and choosing very focused, bite sized problems to solve can help guide your research. “how do I get a CG shader to load in unity?” “how do I export an animation from Maya to Unreal?” “how do I code a pixel on screen?” “how do I skin weight a character in 3DS Max?”

I would also recommend you take an animated asset from end to end: Model, texture, skin, rig, and export to Unity/Unreal, drop it in a level and light it etc (or, light and render a shot if Movies are your goal) You’ll want a passing familiarity with the overall process.

Sorry for the info dump, hope it helps.

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