So what is a technical artist?

So a technical artist will a lot of times bridge the gap between an engineer and an artist. So the artist will make the art content and make all this really amazing stuff. And then the engineers will write all of the kind of backend tools and work on the engine and just give us the ability to do these amazing things that we get to play. But there's this in-between thing that happens where the artists need to interface with this code that the engineers write. And so what a technical artist will do sometimes is they'll write scripts to help interface with some of the more backend code, whether it is you're in your 3D program and you need to export something, or we need to maybe make something faster so the artist can make more content at kind of a faster rate. Or sometimes it's just, things can get complicated and we're trying to figure out, wait, how do we do this? And so it could be as simple as how do we make an explosion, or how do we get this helmet to look as awesome as possible. And so a lot of times we'll take the vision from Chris or a director and then we'll be like, can we do this? Can we hit the benchmark that we want to hit? And sometimes we can and sometimes we can't. And if we can't, we'll step in. We'll figure out how to make it faster. We'll figure out how to make it better. And we'll train up artists. We'll help write documentation. And so our job a lot of times is to help artists be successful, but at the same time really embrace the engineer tools and be able to make sure they reach the full capacity of what they're able to do.