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doodlesarefunyesterday at 11:43 PM1 replyview on HN

Any suggestion for paths into tech art? I'm very strong in traditional media, I know my way around photoshop & blender very well[0] and I've self-studied programming to a level where I can read lower-level (c/c++) code and know what it's doing. I even got a PR merged into blender once!

But I have no industry connection and my public portfolio is mostly charcoal and oil. The company that flew my drone animations is small & didn't get good video of them (there's a cellphone video or two from the audience, but that's not very good for a showreel). I've been thinking of just getting some good footage of a field & using blender to render & composite the designs, but doing that well will be time consuming and I feel like I might be better off doing something else.

Any advice on breaking in?

[0] I made a small blender workflow & add-on before AI to coordinate droneshow animations that I was selling to a small company, used renderdoc to insert gl.readcolors into the renderloop in a very ugly so I could get the benefit of the shader engine, which no commercial drone-animation software could do at the time. Almost worked for a bigger drone company but the contract was untenable.


Replies

shikshaketoday at 5:41 PM

If you're asking for video games/creative studios, unfortunately my best advice is have good connections and a strong public portfolio. Both of these are solvable problems.

Your skills aren't immediately applicable to a tech artist role. You need to learn about the graphics pipeline (high-level) and how 3D models and particle effects are rendered behind the scenes, plus knowing specific tricks for rendering different common visual effects. You can learn all of this from free online resources.