Techical Art Director - Radical Entertainment

Description

The Technical Art Director works in collaboration with the Art Director and the Technical Director to define technical art methods and processes that aim to achieve high quality game art for our Next Generation games. Based on his/her particular domain of expertise, this person is responsible for providing support to Artists, including game content pipeline design, support and maintenance, special effects, shading, lighting, rendering, animation, motion capture and modeling. The Technical Art Director is a good communicator who can provide the requisite training, documentation and design to a group of Artists.


REPORTING STRUCTURE

This person reports to the Art Director. The Technical Art Director collaborates with the Technical Director, Associate Art Director, Art Production Manager and Lead Artists to establish and maintain efficient technical art processes.


ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES

Ensures that art and animation are not compromised by the limitations of technical processes
Focuses on technical implementation of visual design
Researches and develops on current trends in game visuals and other runtime components
Researches and helps in art technology issues related to the game
Acts as a bridge between the Artists and the Engineers
Communicates technical concepts to non-technical staff
Implements and maintains solutions for art technology and art dependencies
Provides a good example to all art staff (internal and 3rd party) and facilitates positive morale by reinforcing the “one-team” and “mutual respect” culture
Participates through personal involvement and effort in the attainment of short-term objectives for one or more assigned processes/projects
Serves as a technical/content resource to assigned processes/projects, assisting in the resolution of complex problems
Directs the work of a small staff of professionals
Interacts with management to keep abreast of the objectives of assigned processes/projects
Interacts with management and peers in other units
Builds and enhances important internal and external contacts
Communicates to transmit and interpret complex information
Reviews work relative to the attainment of defined milestones of assigned processes/projects


DAILY TASKS

Provides technical guidance to Artists and Programmers throughout the product development process
Works with Producers to meet art direction requirements while maintaining game play standard
Ensures that end products meet defined technical and quality standards
Stays abreast of state-of-the-art tools, software and technology for art production and recommends new and modified art software appropriate for games
Recommends tools, workflow, pipelines and runtime components relevant to implementing the art direction of the game (includes research and development on commercially available tools)
Takes on the responsibility for all technical decisions made for art in products
Develops offline prototypes to help illustrate art direction elements and to offer solutions
Helps train artists on toolsets and pipelines
Resolves art pipeline issues (build systems, batch files, file conversions)
Determines workflow for moving art (models, animations, textures) from source to in-game
Writes scripts for Maya and 3DS MAX
Writes small Windows applications
Writes complex DOS/Unix scripts
Sets short-term (one-year) strategic and functional objectives
Provides input to strategies and objectives of major processes/projects
Understands the affects of content creation from game-play and architecture issues to successfully develop workflows that will compensate for such limitations on artistic content
Encourages resolution to conflicts through identifying positive steps and responsibilities