Hi, I’m a technical artist from the Entertainment Technology Center. The most common question I get when I tell people I’m a technical artist, is, what is a technical artist?

So I probably use that question for my introduction! Technical Artists are people with a background with both art and programming. This job typically only exists in the 3D animation or game industry. They are the people who do programming jobs that require an understanding of art or art jobs that require an understanding of programming. These tasks involve writing plugins or tools for artist to use, rigging character models, consulting the art director, creating particle effects, writing shaders, etc

I personally focus on procedural animation, particle effects and post processing/fx. For example, here’s a game I worked on last semester.

http://54.175.30.133/intro/gameQuickIn

I made most of the art assets (excluding the user interface) such as the tiles and the buildings that you can put on them. Making their color look right included rendering a bunch of passes such as ambient occlusion then doing a lot of post processing work in Photoshop to get them to look right. Programming wise, I worked on the river and the particle effects. The river is essentially a 3D river with cosign waves passing through it to the right except that it’s z axis movement is visible and only effects the color via effecting the normals. When you place the buildings down there’s also some dust, that was made by programming several fuzzy dots that spawn and fade away. Those are some examples of technical and programmy stuff that artist just don’t normal do, so they have us tech artists do.