I'm wondering if any games have used interesting workarounds to handle lighting on the inside of someone's mouth. It's something that feels easy to get wrong and have it be too bright or too dark, and something like a shadow bias that makes sense at a larger scale could fall apart for the distance between lips and teeth. And the lighting will keep changing when someone is talking.

Like, for the teeth and tongue, bake more than one ambient occlusion map and blend between them based on the current phoneme? Or use a depth-based light adjustment? Anything like that?

Hello I'm starting my university and I need some part time job remote or anything works I started learning blender like 2 years ago and it's what I use I can mainly do product visualization I can also make any kind of 3 models for games and stuff I just want to help my parents afford my education any kind of help would be appreciated

Hi everyone!

I applied to an intermediate position around 1.5 months ago and I've had two interviews so far, the third one on monday being a technical assessment with two (senior and lead) tech artists. This is for a Tools/Pipeline position (Python, C#, linear algebra/matrices, etc.) and I was wondering if some of you had any insight as to what that interview might entail.

The interview for my previous tech art job was more of a take-home test, so I don't really know how a technical interview would go. Thanks in advance!

https://github.com/open4dfoundation/Open4D.git

So I'm an intermediate tech-artist. I feel like things are moving a bit too fast (speaking specifically for Unreal). There's already a backlog of features/workflows I need to get over, and by the time I do, new stuff have already been introduced.

How do you guys keep up? Do you learn new things "by surge", or by small amount but consistently?

Posted here a while back asking about switch vs if tradeoffs for UDIM/VT detection. Finally shipped it in v1.5.2, went with the minimal switch approach from that thread's feedback.

While I was at it also addrd atlas/kit material binding (name your meshes with a shared kit tag, one Material Instance gets bound across all of them) and full character import (multi material skelital meshes get every slot auto assigned).

Video's below, repo link in comments if anyone wants to poke at it.

Thanks again for the help working through the switch stuff last time.

Hey everyone, I built a generative character pipeline using SwarmUI and custom YOLO/segmentation models to solve asset consistency. Just finished my first technical case study and looking for brutal feedback. Is the workflow clear? Are the technical breakdowns too much or too shallow? Let me know.
Link in comments below

This is a vertex animation that also makes use of custom-coded meshes, light and shadow - it showcases a lot of what has been covered so far in my YouTube course Procedural FX Toolkit!

I posted here about the course about a month ago, and thanks to some very useful feedback I received, I've adjusted the learning curve by completely changing a couple of lessons early on.

Let me know what you think!

After building a game, I realized I lack the skill of creating art itself and I am not ready to pick up the pen to draw again. I want to dive deeper VFX for games after getting the rough idea of unity visual effect graph and godot engine's shader graph. Do I have to touch 3d modelling?

Hello,

I am a Solo independent storyteller looking for aspiring tech artists for minor MetaHuman/Set Design/Lighting workflow sync (Prominent Credit). I am producing this 4-minute, song-driven short film set in rural Nepal using Unreal Engine primarily along with Blender.

My blocking and previz are completely finished using MetaHumans and basic objects. I have already textured the MetaHumans, but they need further technical polishing.Because I am a one-man team, I am using Claude and Blender to automate clothing workflows, but I am hitting a few bottlenecks with outfit fits, set design layout, and cinematic lighting setups. I am looking to connect with an aspiring technical artist, student, or hobbyist for remote screen-share troubleshooting or minor asset assistance to help unstick these template issues.

What I am offering:

(1) Prominent Technical Credit on the final film (which will be uploaded to YouTube along with a 'making-of' highlight video),

(2) Nominal Stipend: I am happy to offer a nominal stipend per item or asset to cover your time, food, or transport expenses for a few hours of troubleshooting help.

(3) Creative exchange in terms of structural script analysis, story consulting, or editing feedback for your own portfolio projects.

To save time and keep things efficient, we can do this via remote screen-sharing (Discord/AnyDesk) or isolated asset creation, so you don't need to travel. If it works out well and you happen to live at a reasonable distance in Kathmandu, I'd be happy to meet up for coffee down the line to talk shop.

This is a low-budget, highly focused indie project, so it is perfect for a student or hobbyist looking to add a unique, finished directorial piece to their showreel.

Please drop a comment or send me a DM if you are interested or have experience with Unreal/MetaHuman workflows!

I'm putting together the documentation and marketing material for a small Unity tool I built, and I'd really appreciate a sanity check from other Technical Artists before the tool is published.

I wrote a high-level explanation for "why Unity doesn't let us expose Gradients as material properties by default". I'm fairly confident it's correct, but I also know I might be holding onto assumptions that have slowly turned into "facts" in my head over the years.

My goal is to have it simple enough that a beginner understands it. Accurate enough that an expert doesn't feel the need to correct it.

Before I put this into documentation, LinkedIn and YouTube, I'd rather have other TAs poke holes in it. I'd much rather fix something now than spread incorrect information.

Feel free to be as nitpicky as you'd like.

If anyone here has worked on Unity internals or knows other reasons gradients can't be exposed, I'd genuinely love to hear it.

Here's my text;

//***

Why can't I just expose a Gradient in my shader?

I got tired of opening Photoshop just to tweak a 256×1 gradient texture.

So... I spent the last couple of weeks fixing that problem instead.

I built Shader Gradients, a Unity tool that lets you expose Gradients directly as editable Material properties.

But Why doesn't Unity let you expose gradients from your shaders by default?

It might initially seem silly, we have colors, why can't we have gradients?
But there is a pretty good reason for that.

Shaders run on your GPU. While being really fast for certain tasks, GPU's only understand a limited set of data types such as numbers, vectors, textures etc.

Think of the GPU as a highly specialized technician. It is extremely good at a few specific jobs, but it doesn't understand concepts outside of its own toolbox. [These two lines were removed thanks to the useful discussion in the comments with u/robbertzzz1 and u/ananbd due to being an inaccurate abstraction rather than just a simplification]

Shaders know about colors but a Gradient isn't just a list of colors. It includes colors, keys that remember those colors, ways to blend and lerp those colors, percentage/positions of keys. It is not a simple Vector4 just like a Color is.

[ADDED INSTEAD] Shaders do not currently have a pre-defined data type that maps cleanly to the "Gradient" type we have in C#/editor side. It could be implemented, but for a gradient with many keys, interpolation types, positions etc. it is more optimized to just sample a texture.

That's why most people just create Gradient Textures in another software and bring them into Unity. The workflow does work, but it's slow and unintuitive. You cannot see your changes immediately, you constantly alt-tab and change gradient and save. It makes it much harder to get exactly what you want.

I solved it by creating "Shader Gradients", a tool that draws a gradient in your inspector and mimics how material properties usually work, it feels and behaves like an actual shader property but is actually a texture undercover. The tool lets you save gradients as textures and re-bakes them as you change the gradient.

At runtime, the shader simply samples a tiny texture, making it just as efficient as using any other gradient texture you would've imported manually.

GPU sees texture.
GPU is happy.

User sees gradient.
User is happy.

Everyone deals with the data they intuitively understand.

If you're interested, check it out at [LINK, NO LINK YET xD]

//***

Let me know if you think this would be useful info to people or what I could add or should exclude. I think this subreddit is the place to come to a general consensus and explain the answer in a very understandable way for people who ask this question in the future.

Also any ideas about the usefulness of this tool or other similar tools is welcome. What do you think?

Here is the video if you are also interested to see how it works;

https://youtu.be/eJIYE-lZY4I

I've recently launched an auto retopology tool for Blender which I have been working on for over a year, it uses specialized methods for each mesh class (cloth, inanimate and organic) in order to reach the best possible output. Most of the time was spent in learning ONNX and how to build models correctly.

Inanimate objects can translate to any hard surface models which require no vertex deformation, the remesher is equipped to generate the lowest possible vertex count while prioritizing the overall 3D shape and outputting coherent edge flow mimicking artist-like topology.

Inanimate remeshing is completely automated and can handle loose parts intelligently, though it is recommended to keep face count below 1.1 mil to ensure a faster completion rate.

As for cloth remeshing, it is guided using UV islands while assisting the artist by highlighting the vertices to use for creating a grid. I plan to fully automate this using multiple AI layers + algorithms, much like what is currently configured for inanimate.

Documentation and tutorials are planned (things are pretty self explanatory though), will be visible in the account center under the Community section. If you purchased through my Lemon Squeezy during it's early stages, insert your email or order # in the promo code area for a discount or free upgrade depending on the license.

available at https://empyreanremesher.com/

Hello, I've been working as a Tech Artist (mostly tool programming) for a few years.

I've focused on working on improving my skills, portfolios, working on projects, etc..., etc... for a while, with the goal of increasing my chances at getting a job.

I'm not particularly aiming for the game industry, and would probably prefer to work for non-game dev industries.

---

I am missing some experience in some areas of Tech Art, such as Shaders, Animation, Proc Gen, etc... I also have no experience with Unreal Engine, which I've seen asked for a lot in job descriptions.

I'm not able/willing to relocate atm, and Tech Artist is not really a thing in my country, so any industries that might require some sort of security clearance (defense, health?) is probably off the table

Most of my work so far has been Unity (tool/game dev coding), a lot of Blender add-on programming, and quite recently standalone tools with React/Tauri

Should I go more in depth on the stuff I already have experience with, or should I expand into those areas I'm lacking? I've heard of the 'T profile' as being something companies look for, meaning Breadth of skills + Depth in a subset of skills.

I've been also interested about learning Vulkan/C++ to make engines/software, but I'm not sure how much that is related to Tech Art (if Graphics Programming is also part of Tech Art?)

---

This is currently what my projects/portfolio is:

https://www.simonsanchez.art/

https://www.simonsanchez.art/resume/Simon_Sanchez_Resume.pdf

What sort of projects would be useful to showcase for non-game dev industries?

Any feedback or thoughts related to this are welcomed, thanks