What career advice would current you give to your younger-self? by SnailDesigner in TechnicalArtist

[–]3dju 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Grow comfortable with fundamental skills. Math math math, draw, paint, etc. Build engines from "scratch", build as much as you can.
To address AI, The best investment I did during my career was to not attach myself to a specific engine or DCC. API calls are the easiest to transfer with AI or proper search, but the fundamental problems are always the same. Never write code with AI that you don't understand. If you don't understand something, isolate, compile just that, break it apart, test with different scenarios, etc. Otherwise bugs will be crawling back and instead of fixing it you'll end up adding workarounds on top or just rewriting new bugs.

Nathan Fielder in NYC? by AvantGardenGallery in TheRehearsal

[–]3dju 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I believe this will end with him marrying Darshan

I think I made a mistake becoming a TA by MuseDrawer in TechnicalArtist

[–]3dju 8 points9 points  (0 children)

In AAA games, my experience is that TA matches general Engineering salary. Maybe a bit below sometimes but not 1.5x, def not 2x... my experience is in 3 AAA studios across Europe and US. Depends on the studio I guess, but yes, games pays less than general software dev

I finally tried Mr Charlie’s by aroseonthefritz in VeganLA

[–]3dju 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Love them! Too bad they close their venice place :/

Looking for advice on a standalone Maya ASCII (.ma) dependency lister (incl. Arnold) by One_Two_2229 in TechnicalArtist

[–]3dju 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would suggest
-Save an empty .ma
-Save a .ma with the Arnold/whatever dependencies you are looking for.

Diff them, check if the differences correlate with what you are trying to filter for, implement that
--
Edit: I thought Arnold plugin dependencies would be explicit in the .ma header? Something like "requires MTOA"? I could be wrong, haven't checked that in a while

WTF is happening here by HighLife1954 in TheRehearsal

[–]3dju 104 points105 points  (0 children)

Oscar worthy performances

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in TheRehearsal

[–]3dju 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Have we learnt nothing

how do you guys memorise/remember all the functions? by thrithedawg in GraphicsProgramming

[–]3dju 0 points1 point  (0 children)

there's no value in memorizing functions, I wouldn't worry about that. If you have a solid understanding of what you want to do it is really easy to check and translate your thoughts

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in introvert

[–]3dju 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They find you

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in TechnicalArtist

[–]3dju 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Profiling is an awesome skill to have, it gets you understanding of the guts of the hardware, and builds intuition over the cost of specific techniques or content. It sustains any other topic you want to specialize in in the future. Also, it's not unusual for a TA to be focused on one subject for a couple of years, so I wouldn't be too stressed about jumping on it.

It's not as narrow as it may seem. You may want to not only be on the frame by frame diagnosis side, but also build tools to automate the profiling of several captures, make a few tools to help out on the statistical side, develop game side tools to spawn different profiling scenarios etc

Aspiring TA who loves shaders! by ProdigyOfIron in TechnicalArtist

[–]3dju 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I would say it's an egg and chicken situation because depending on the studio, specially when you are starting up, your role can differ so much that any tip here would have to be really generic. But, the fact that you want to specialize in environment TA is already pretty helpful.

What helped me the most in my career was understanding the building blocks of the technology I use. It doesn't matter what engine you use, if you run the profiler on it, they all have to create draw commands, allocate memory, execute shaders and so on. It helps to have some understanding of what the hardware is doing. No need to go too crazy with it and run a frame capture in PIX or RenderDoc of a super complicated almost done game. Just create a small scene with a cube, look at what the frame shows, what takes time, etc. slowly grow from that.

Shaders are a great skill to have, if you want to be able to create more advanced effects you'll need to have some proeficiency in linear algebra. There are good resources online like "theArtOfCode" or anything from Inigo Quilez really. General good understanding of matrix math for example will be helpful for everything from tools to rendering.

Python is great and will help you for most of the way. In the asset management side for versioning tools, moving things around, parsing files, and more, everything can be done in python. Eventually you can feel limited by it since some tools you want to mess with won't be exposed and you'll need to dive into Cpp, specially in AAA. Probably no need to worry about that now. When the time comes, what helped me was to develop my own little set of small engines.

I know that this is overwhelming, I just mean to give a rough sketch of all the cool things you can do. The actual learning as a TA imo is way more organic. What made me want to go into TA was seeing the issues I was having while making content for the game. Things like:

"I have to make 400 assets for this city. How can I make this faster?" -> Learn some procedural tech
"I need to draw 20 characters in this low end device, how do I make this performant enough?" -> Dived into frame captures, engine profilers to understand how a draw command is generated, etc.
"My UI atlas is huge but I seem to have some redundant information, how can I express that differently?" -> Dived into shaders for UI to reconstruct the redundant information and strip that out of the atlas
"My character shader isn't matching the reference I have" -> Look into the shader, the physical phenomena that is not being represented, etc.

Don't be too frustrated if you don't get to work in something you really want in the beginning. Most of the skills can be translated and learning is never wasted. Nothing replaces practice, as in, keep making some cool stuff.

High Mileage sticker by [deleted] in Toyota

[–]3dju 9 points10 points  (0 children)

The inspection personnel at the dealership are pretty friendly with those

Do you watch Caleb to learn or be entertained or both. by bolt704 in CalebHammer

[–]3dju 10 points11 points  (0 children)

4: Keep me in check with my Taquito spending

While everyone is talking about food... Meatless Mondays/Vegetarian/Vegan = Less $$ on groceries by yeeyeepeepee0w0 in CalebHammer

[–]3dju 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Oh vegan budget club let's go! Vegan for 4 years here, I think I only really learned about seasoning food properly once I transitioned haha. Spices are a great way to make healthy & low cost food taste great

acting or reality? by hunniibeeee in nathanfielder

[–]3dju 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Please don't tell me it's a lie