Thread by @delaneykingrox

Dm question on where to start learning to become a #gamedev technical artist.

First, drop "become" and think in terms of 'developing' as a technical artist.

It is a wide range of skills and techniques you can adopt over time, making you art more and more technical.

No two technical artists have the same skill sets, but I would say we all have the same mindset.

We like solving problems ourselves.

Tech art is just gathering up and arming yourself to tackle those problems.

No two artists the same and the same applies to technical artists.

I wouldn't be able to code c# extensions to unity right now, or write exporters for blender in python. Yet.

Why? Because I was max script and mel, then I was in unreal blueprints.

I wrote all of the tools to integrate Shave and a Haircut into Animal Logic's system, and developed scripted tools to get Zeus's beard to work in our God of War trailer.

That was all in Mel. I haven't used python since the first x box.

My advice is start small, make a list of what you want to be able to do, or understand.
Break large skillsets down into smaller tricks.
"I wanna do shaders". Cool... but break that down into things like... okay, how do I blend textures... how do I make terrain paints... etc

Ultimately, what you are doing is breaking things down to answerable questions, then filling those in until the problems you face are overwhelmed with the answers you have.

My top tip is to learn the basics.
What is a vertex? What is a vector? What are UVs? How does color work?

@FreyaHolmer has a whole bunch of videos breaking down the math concepts used by game developers into easily grasped visuals.

Start learning to program by the most useful and accessable entry path to you.
And by that, I mean if you are a visual person, try a visual node based system like unreal blueprints, unity bolt or unity playmaker.

Shader graph tools are actually visual coding systems too.

Your goal isn't to become a programmer, per se, though that's cool... the goal is to start to understand how things work under the hood. And from that solutions start appearing to you.

Wait... I don't have to place all this stuff manually, I can make a blueprint that does this for me.

Wait... I don't have to store this texture five times, I can make a shader that shares the same map.

Wait... I can make a tool that finds all the geo under the terrain...

A technical artist works smarter, not harder.

Right now I am solving technical challenges of a project using the unity animation system.

The project before I was making a painting come alive in VR using unreal.

Before that I was making wooden swords become metal using substance designer in unity.

It's crazy varied stuff

Just aim at being a little more technical each week by studying and tinkering.

Think about it like you are buying yourself the best lego kit in the world.