Tech Art Works

When you're chipping away at your next script, exporter, framework, or just really anything that requires you to do some work, it's tempting to get sucked in and just write code for its own sake. You can even go as far as finding excuses to build systems simply because you're interested in finding out how they work, almost regardless of whether you can justify their cost. This is often an easy trap to fall into, because often, these systems do carry value in the mid-to-long term. When it comes to Tech Art, long-term solutions are generally not the thing we work on most. The average lifetime of a given solution Tech Art builds tends to be a subset of the total production time. As project needs change, Tech Art adapts and builds solutions for problems the project encounters, almost always on an as-needed basis. It can be tempting, then, to chase the next solution as it comes up: artists are having trouble constructing levels quickly? Work on placement tools. Lots of buildings...

Building a multi-DCC exporter from scratch On any given production, one of the first things the Tech Art Teams tend to build is an exporter. This is easily explained: of all the problems facing any given project, reliably and consistently transferring content between your DCC and your engine (whatever they may be), is one of the most valuable ones to solve early. Even as of the time of writing, in an industry where game engines become ever more all-encompassing, external DCCs continue to play a vital role in productions, after all. Doing so ensures that even during early preproduction, your models and textures are exported through a known method that can be controlled - providing the opportunity for early validation and simple checks before content gets into the engine. In other words, this puts an immediate filter on your content pipeline from day 1, ensuring that all content produced thereafter passes through it. In this short tutorial, we will be looking at bui...