Tag: tech art

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Tech Art

Perforce “Cannot mkdir” Error

I ran into an issue setting up my own Perforce server recently where I could not submit local files to a depot I had created manually. Perforce threw all manner of errors including “cannot mkdir <depotname>” etc. etc. etc. Looking online, it seemed like the issue ran much deeper than it actually was. The problem, I found out, was that when I made the new depot I had set its mapping as “//<depotname>/…”, which is wrong. All depot mappings in Perforce need to be “<depotname>/…” because they are mapped to the p4root directory.

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Tech Art

Building Tech Art Infrastructure I

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…

Continue reading “Building Tech Art Infrastructure I”
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Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Tech Art Roundtable 3

How do you optimize across multiple platforms?

Optimizing for WinXP is bad because it’s worse than phones right now

More people at the roundtable compared to two years ago. The room was too full!

 

Education -> Need TA students to solve real-world problems

  • Tech Art training sounds like its best done on a person-by-person basis, so many skills that can’t be taught in classroom
  • Find the ones that have a talent or interest in it? Are they problem-solvers? Do they tinker? Do they teach other students?
  • Have potential TAs do a rotation through IT (Or expand role of lab monitors to really include troubleshooting student issues, and pump TAs through that)

 

How do you institutionally encourage this behavior?

  • Documentation, Tools-writing, Tinkering, Helping other students
  • Potential TAs need to get work done too, establish rules so they can get it done
  • Mentorship of younger TAs by established ones in school?
  • Hire students to act as tech artists in on-campus facilities?

 

Tech Artists are Force Multipliers, Firefighters, and Preemptive Firefighters

  • Look Development
    • Shaders
  • Tools programming
  • Problem-solvers
  • Riggers
    • Tech Animators
  • Outsource Wranglers

 

They MUST work alongside artists, be embedded with them (works well at Volition)

TAs need people and managerial skills

 

How do you test tech artists right out of school?

  • Tests

Games are innovating faster because teams are smaller and more agile than film