Saturday, February 25, 2012

Goodbye SquareSpace...

...hello Blogger!

I've hosted my site at SquareSpace for couple years now, and I've loved it. The switch to Blogger wasn't an easy decision. The most attractive reason was the cost. It's free. While Blogger has always been quite scalable, SquareSpace offered much more behind the scenes.

Since the adoption of HTML5 and CSS3, the benefits of SquareSpace's 'ease-of-use' formatting are no longer worth my coin. I'd much rather dive back into some light web development and save the cash.

Friday, November 11, 2011

What is a Technical Artist?

There are so many descriptions as to what a technical artist is or might be, that it is often difficult to understand, in general, what the title translates to practically and professionally. Some may describe the position as a character rigger, lighting TD, or art tools developer. These titles can all fit the mold of a technical artist, but they don't quite answer the question.


I have had an extremely hard time describing what I do, because it ranges in disipline and scope, and is so often changing. I've chosen, for the time being, to consider myself as an art tools developer. I write code in Python to create tools for 3D applications that game artists use. But...that is not all I do. I can, in some capacity, rig, model, and animate as well, but I always come back to the foundation of those processes...the tools.


So what is a technical artist? Leonardo DaVinci, in my honest opnion, was the first modern technical artist. His passion for life and it's underlying mechanics drove him to create. I believe that is the essence of any artistic venture. The pure artist uses expression and experience to develop a piece, but there is something not mentioned, something so obvious. The brush, the canvas, the tools...the inventor.


As technical artists, we invent. Be it a rig, a pipeline, or a shader, we sketch out ideas, we take what was old and make it new. We make things possible. We invent.


I think simply put, a technical artist is in someway an inventor. What do you think?