Tech Art Works

One of the most common considerations I have to take into account in my day job is that of User Environments. Like most technical artists, I do not fully control the machine set-up for most of the people using the tools I help build.  This is pretty common; as tech artists, we can ask our IT departments to distribute specific software packages, maybe even versions, but beyond that there's little we can do to ensure a given user is set up entirely in line with our wishes, short of us physically walking over to their desktop and checking it for ourselves; an option not always available to us. Table of Contents The Three Degrees of Control There are many ways to describe the degree of control you can exert over a given user's development environment as a software engineer. However, for the sake of simplicity, I like to categorize them using the following three labels: "Overlord", "Squad Chief" and "Distant Observer". Overlord In the "...

When setting up a new DCC, or building basic infrastructure for your studio's artists to use, one of the most critical components to get right from the start is how they launch, use and interact with their content creation tools, otherwise referred to as DCCs (short for Digital Content Creation software). If you export your content from, say, Maya, you want to ensure that all Maya files in your project are set up correctly, using the same unit scale, system units, up axis, frame rate, etc...  You also don't want any of these things to be left up to the artist; there are simply too many things that can go wrong, and the cost of issues like this not being caught until a great deal of content has been produced incorrectly can potentially be crippling for a project. So how do you ensure a DCC is setup for the artist, correctly, every time they launch it? The simple answer: give them a launcher that does it for them. "But" I hear you say, "launch...