This is a summation of the discussion and progress I’ve reported so far, and will continue to do (until such time as my employment at Vigil ends… at the end of the month), on this Tech-Artists.org thread
First, some background. When I started at Vigil as an Environment Artist, the extent of Tech Art at the studio was a few tools that had been created for Darksiders I back in 2007. Few people at the company know MaxScript, or Python, and the Environment Art team had no one to go to if they thought of something that needed automation. If those people existed, their presence wasn’t well-publicized. In my first few weeks, I noticed myself hitting the same buttons hundreds of times to do the same things. I pinged h6x6n to give me a hand and automate one of these things, and in the process acted as an intermediary between him and Max to make sure the code worked. From there, the artists immediately around me started to request other automated macros. A few months later I was adding these scripts and others into our official toolset, had access to the code branch, and spent more and more time writing tools both in Python and Maxscript. The scope of the tools I was writing grew, the number of teams I was assisting grew, I started talking to programmers, helping producers generate reports on various pieces of data in the game. I was a tech artist. Familiar story, yes? It all goes down hill from there…