Personal Understanding of technology and art

What is technology and art and what is needed:

With my understanding, tech artist in the gaming industry should be derived from technical guidance in film and TV animation or tech ctor ). in addition, R & D (Research and Development) often works with the title of technical art or technical guidance. Although there are two positions: technical arts and technical guidance, the requirements are similar. In most cases, tech ctor refers to art with many years of experience. Mastering scripts is only an optional skill. Most of them are responsible for the software and process of art in daily production. Technical Arts (Tech artist) software scripts such as maxscript or Mel are essential skills, and other scripts or languages such as Python, C # \ c ++ are optional skills, you may not have a long working experience in fine arts.ProgramStrong capabilities, weak working experience in fine arts, development of some tools, and a bridge between art and programs. There is no subordination between the two just because the definition of division of labor is slightly different, and the difference is also vague.

 

As for what technology and art require, I personally think that the style of action is far more important than what you have mastered. Therefore, first of all, technical art should dare to touch anything, as long as it is within the scope of art, graphics and games, dare to learn knowledge in any field. It seems simple, but not easy. You can see that most people say this, but this is not the case. As for why, we need to solve various things in the production process of the game. We may need to touch maxscript and JavaScript of Photoshop, maybe you still need to use Python or C # To deal with some common small issues, or even make some changes to existing tools. Of course, the most basic role is to serve as the middle layer of art and programs, responsible for communication between the two sides, as an interface person, in order to do a good job, the interface person had to be familiar with some graphics concepts, related mathematical concepts, and game logic concepts.

 

Second, I like to do art work or games. I like to go through the whole process, from models to animations and special effects. Of course I can write a game demonstration by myself, or use an existing engine to write a demo. In this regard, the art and program skills do not require product-level quality. As long as you can make a rough look, you can understand the tools and technologies used by art. Skill requirements are not high, but you need to enjoy it, that is, you need to have a high or even high interest. Why do you like this? In my opinion, the reason why the tools of programs often make art difficult is that programs do not always work with these tools, therefore, they are considering factors such as expansion, flexibility, and stability. Maybe the convenience of the most commonly used art is ignored. Then the art raised the demand and submitted it to the program. Then the program looked at it and said, "Oh, this is not easy to use, but now there is more important work to do, such as the xxx vulnerability, if this problem is not easy to use, please put it aside ". Therefore, it is shelved infinitely. If we say that technology and art only write scripts or even a professional program, but they do not usually use art tools, things will remain the same as they did before, and there will be no improvement. At this time, the technical arts act as an art tool user experience designer. This role is ideally capable of developing tools. So the best condition is that the user is the developer.

 

Another important reason is that, if a person who does not understand the program communicates with the Program (for example, to add a new function to the tool), the program will usually reject it directly. In fact, the reason is also very simple. If you do not understand it, it is very likely that I will explain to you for a long time that you still do not understand it, and then I will explain why you cannot understand it, because you do not understand it. Therefore, in an ideal situation (for example, every program will patiently explain all the problems), maybe the technology and art do not need to understand the program, but the reality is so heartless. Such a state of patience and interpretation poses a great risk, because it is very likely to take a lot of time and in vain (at this time, art students do not need to think that programmers are too busy, if someone asks you what Max can do and how long it will take ), therefore, procedural knowledge has become a necessary condition for technical and art, hard and indispensable. Here I can give an example. A friend once needed a Maya plug-in, but the plug-in does not have a 32-bit version. Fortunately, the author was a Chinese speaker and released a source file for download. So he went to the author to find a 32 version, and the author refused him directly. Then this friend found me. After I got the source code, I found that I needed some library settings. Then I went to the author to ask, and the author told me very cheerfully thatCodeIf I need a plug-in of a certain version, I only need to send the corresponding mayasdk file to Him, and He will compile and send it to me. This is often the case. Even if you know a little bit about it, it will be helpful for you to communicate with the program.

 

In my recent work, I found that art never imagined how much visual breakthrough it can make on the game. In fact, this breakthrough requires the participation of art. Let me give you the most obvious example. Actions, especially Max, have simple and convenient CS, so many people do not understand the basis of the skeleton, resulting in their own understanding of the skeleton and animation is very crude, for example, the shaking caused by Ik, the axial changes caused by gimbal, and the deformation of sub-objects caused by scaling may be invisible and may even be considered a software problem. If you want to explain what functions are required with the program, you cannot explain them. For example, dhalsim in the street bully can stretch your hands and feet, while Max is the default, A single axial scaling will cause deformation when its child objects are rotated. Max itself can cancel the zooming inheritance of the child objects to prevent this problem. Some animation workers do not know the cause of the problem, and even do not know how to raise requirements with the program, completely unable to communicate. In this case, how can we make breakthroughs in animation? Many artists only want the program to provide a standard and then complete it step by step. Frankly speaking, I think it will be difficult to make a breakthrough if this ideology persists without changing.

 

It is difficult to find technical and art. As far as I know, most of the industry's technical and art products only use a few scripts, including some well-known companies in the industry, there are very few programmers who can develop program skills. However, it is difficult to retain the technical and fine arts that reach or close to this level. First, if he is making money, playing games will have more room for development. Second, if he is pursuing technology, starting from your own interests and hobbies, the program can easily occupy a large proportion in his direction, and it is likely to be followed by pure programs. It is easier to maintain the true color of technology that is biased towards independent game developers, but it is also easy to turn into a true independent game developer because of their own interests, and finally leave the team. However, this is not a problem. The premise is that the art in the team has an atmosphere of interest in technology research and a Research Spirit. I have always believed that it is not a bad thing for a team or a company to come to people. As long as research can accumulate, the spirit can continue. This atmosphere is more important than recruiting several top-level technical and art talents. Without this atmosphere, it would be useless to find more people, it is difficult to eliminate the gap between art and technical art and establish trust. In this case, the technology and art can easily be isolated and cannot be left. Therefore, it is better to spend more energy to cultivate the research atmosphere of art than to recruit technical and art talents. If there is no such atmosphere, even if there is technology and art, it will not play the best role, second, it is very likely that the cainiao of mixed life.

 

In addition, many people think of technology and art as a program. This idea is wrong. First of all, he is a person who likes art and may not necessarily like it as a job, but at least he is happy to do something. On this basis, he prefers to study skills, study basic knowledge, and keep up with technological changes. Of course, it may be because of these reasons that he may go farther and farther on the program, but it does not mean that you should treat him as a program.

Here I can give some examples. I like to study skeleton binding, so I did this, instead of doing this because I like development.

I did this because I like special effects, not because I like development.

Similarly, because I like 3D animation, I will do this first after obtaining the kinectsdk.

I also like modeling, but it is really not good. This is totally irrelevant to the code.

I think it is a very dangerous signal if you look at technology and art as a program. Most people do not want to learn maxscript, Mel, or mayapython because they want to become programs. They just want to make themselves more convenient or less constrained by the existing functions of some software, the software also understands that there are a variety of requirements in reality and cannot fully meet them. Therefore, scripts and sdks are provided.

Using them as programs can easily turn them into programs and break them away from art. This is the greatest sorrow.

After work, I did not make anything I could recognize. What I could do was perhaps sad.