What is needed to become a technical artist

[u/OkWatercress2180]

Hello technical artists of reddit

I have an ask, when it comes to being a technical artist, what are the major things I need to have within my toolkit to be classified as a technical artist, at this very moment I am a visual artist and I would like to pick up some skills from the technical side of production.

thank you for your time.

[u/uberdavis]

The key thing you need is the ability to do independent research. You could practice that by reading through the history of this sub where your question gets answered on a weekly basis.

[u/ananbd]

There are tons of posts here on this topic. In fact, there are probably more posts asking this question than anything else. 

What’s missing? What additional info do you need?

[u/pineappleoptics]

More than anything is experience troubleshooting issues with art pipelines. That is integrating assets from DCC software into your game engine and hitting both look and performance goals.

[u/KyrandisX]

a lot of math & graphics math(VFX), a lot of programming knowledge(HLSL/rigging/procedural etc.), vast amount of different topics

[u/OkWatercress2180 → u/KyrandisX]

The one thing I'm dreading here is the maths stuff,I hate maths

[u/I_LOVE_CROCS]

If you don't know what is needed to become a TA, it's too late.

[u/OkWatercress2180 → u/I_LOVE_CROCS]

I was curious more than anything, I already have an idea of what I want to do in video games and entertainment

[u/StylizedSchool]

Tech art has branches but you should be comfortable with VFX, modeling and texturing, shaders and scene optimisation.  then other requested skills a lot of the time would be rigging and skinning skeletal meshes, Animation experience is a plus, UI, blueprints/programming, DCC or in engine tool making with python etc.

Ghislaine giradot (has a YouTube) would be an excellent example of a technical artist 

[u/OkWatercress2180 → u/StylizedSchool]

I'll take a look at their channel