Rhys Shepherd is a Technical Artist with over five years at Epic Games, working with coding and developing tools for engines like Unity and Unreal Engine. He has also worked with shading tools as well as game optimisation pipelines for Fall Guys and Fortnite.
He came in today to give us a talk about what it is like to be a Technical Artist. I have heard of the role before but never really considered it as something I could go into if I got better at code. Here are some notes I made below:
Notes (Written & Scanned)
What I learned – 3 Things
- I didn’t ask a question this week as I felt the lecture covered everything I was going to ask. Here are 3 tips that I felt were more applicable to me from the lecture.
- Cancelled games aren’t the end of the world – use your skills for future games.
- Specialise!!! If you have a certain Tech art role to specialise in, learn the specific skills for it, and it will help you with jobs.
- Industry programs are favoured, so it will give you a leverage over others to learn. Maya over Blender, Adobe over Gimp are a few that come to mind. If you can learn the programs (or have money for it), it will be a massive bonus.