Why AAA Studios Invest So Much in Technical Art: What Every Artist Can Learn From It

Brendon Vitz is a Technical Art Director with experience at major game companies including Riot Games and EA. Throughout his career, he has worked on Technical Art, production pipelines, tools, workflow optimization, and helping artists and engineers build games together more efficiently.

Technical Art is one of those jobs almost everyone depends on, but few people can clearly explain what it actually is.

↓ Video showcasing Technical Art by Brendon Vitz

When everything works, artists move faster, assets arrive in the engine without surprises, and nobody even notices Technical Art. When something breaks, suddenly everyone is asking why the shader exploded, why the export failed, or why one tiny naming mistake ruined someone’s afternoon.

This interview is about what Technical Art really is, why AAA studios invest so much in it, and what artists and smaller teams can learn before production turns into a pile of mysterious broken files.

MAIN TOPICS

• What Technical Artists Actually Do
• Tools & Pipeline Automation
• Building Scalable Art Workflows
• Production Habits for Artists
• Technical Art for Small Teams
• Technical Art Beyond Games
• Why AAA Studios Invest in Technical Art

Interview

With Brendon Vitz, Technical Art Director

Q: Technical Art can feel like a dark room in game production. Everyone knows the door exists, but not everyone knows what happens behind it. What does a Technical Artist actually do?

Technical Art is a broad discipline like Artist or Software Engineer, so the short answer is that there is no single all-encompassing answer for what we do. In fact, you’ll often find it varies widely even within the same team. At the highest level, though, Technical Artists are generally hybrid developers who use their combination of technical knowledge and artistic chops to empower others around them and efficiently integrate the game’s creative content into the engine.

We are expected to understand the fundamentals of what makes quality art, how games come together end to end, and where bottlenecks are going to stymie the creative vision of the product we’re working on. That means automating repetitive processes like exports, shoring up fragile workflows, validating content quality, authoring technically complex content like shaders or rigs, and facilitating communication across disciplines that interact with art.

There are a lot of different ways to subdivide the discipline to help folks better guess what to expect from any given Technical Artist, but I generally consider myself a Tools & Pipelines specialist. I have less experience in the Rendering and Rigging aspects of Technical Art, and as such, my answers throughout the rest of this interview will be focused more on what I know, though I’ll try to touch on everything at least a bit.

Tools and Pipeline Technical Artists generally lie somewhere between Software Engineers and Artists, with a majority of our direct contributions coming in the form of planning, coding, and troubleshooting in support of art workflows. I always enjoyed glibly stating that my job was making buttons for artists; it’s reductive, but in reality, my primary goals were always to simplify workflows, speed up iteration, and reduce bugs.

By creating reusable Python (generally) libraries and then tools on top of those that handle all the core creative workflows, we’re able to systemically address failure cases and prevent artists from wasting time doing rote, error-prone work like saving files by hand.

↓ Technical Art by Brendon Vitz

To that end, I’ve created art tool deployment systems, all manner of asset exporters, automated asset quality validation systems, game preview tools, batch editors, and Perforce managers. When these are well built, they provide a backbone for a game’s creative output and ensure the team can not only handle the currently known asks, but also quickly expand into new content as needed.

Beyond pipeline work, I’ve always prioritized facilitating discussions between folks in different disciplines like software engineering, art, design, and production. My knowledge of how all the various pieces of the game slot together to create the final product, combined with my broad understanding of every discipline’s requirements and quality bars, allowed me to help translate requests between folks who didn’t have shared expertise.

For example, when we were developing a new baked lighting system for League of Legends, our rendering engineer and environment artists would consistently talk past each other, each making demands that felt impossible to the other party.

I was instrumental in helping everyone clarify their requests and then narrowing the solution space down to something that balanced visual quality where it mattered while staying performant on all machine specs.

I also want to call out some other TA specialties that are instrumental to game development. Rigging Technical Artists, sometimes referred to as Character Tech Artists, focus on developing and implementing character rigs to empower their team’s animators and unlock new kinds of animations that weren’t possible before.

↓ Technical Art by Brendon Vitz

This covers everything from the basics of creating a puppetable skeleton that allows an animator to work at all, to advanced controls that streamline complex motion and features into easy-to-use systems that make cloth movements, transformations, or effective stretch frames possible. Beyond that, they frequently design character customization systems, spearhead character debugging, design the workflows for character assets, and drive character performance optimization.

Rendering & Lighting Technical Artists focus on the systems and complexities of how visual art gets displayed on a player’s screen. They blend artistic talent and mathematical knowledge to drive lighting systems, create shaders, enhance particles, and help the team hone the look of the game into whatever the art direction needs. Work done in this space is the translation layer that turns raw assets like textures, models, lights, and arrays of numbers into the final, unique, high-quality look that makes games pop.

Q: Have you ever built a tool that saved artists hundreds or even thousands of hours? Can you share an example?

Oh yeah, there are quite a few tools I created specifically to sit at the core of our artists’ iteration loop and make their lives easier every day. Consistently achieving quality art is often a matter of iteration, so the faster someone can get an idea into the game each time they sit down to work, the better your final product will be. To that end, I wrote several different Photoshop export tools at Riot Games, but I’ll focus on my last iteration.

Now, Photoshop doesn’t natively support Python development, but I wanted to be able to leverage our existing Python libraries for everything else and make developing the tool more accessible to the rest of the team compared to the previous JavaScript version.

I created a sidecar PyQt application that artists could launch alongside Photoshop, using Windows COM to communicate with it. The tool was built around the idea that TAs would define various asset types, like a character texture, in code via subclasses, specifying exactly what the tool needed to do on export.

↓ Screenshot tool by Brendon Vitz

It could handle things like resizing, toggling layer visibility, pre/post scripts, and multiple destination files, while automatically managing Perforce operations and connections in our asset configuration system for anything it touched. It also saved any user-changed settings into the metadata of the Photoshop file, meaning that once an export size was modified by an artist, it persisted across all users.

From an artist’s perspective, they would open a file and the tool would load the appropriate workflow based on the metadata, or infer it from context clues if it was a new file. It would then configure the UI to match that workflow, showing valid actions, the Perforce status of all relevant files, and a big ol’ green EXPORT button. In 99% of cases, they would just paint up whatever they wanted in the file and then press that button with no need to touch anything else.

The tool would automatically check for known issues, check out or add any relevant files, resize as needed, perform some fancy intermediate file management under the hood to create quality DDS files, and then write or copy files to their destinations. In seconds, Maya and the game would both hot-load the new textures (well, with most workflows), and artists were on to their next step.

With a hand-painted game like League of Legends, artists might press this button dozens of times per day, so the reliability and speed gains in each export multiplied across the hundred-plus artists we had produced enormous time savings.

Q: If a small team or solo developer cannot afford a Technical Artist yet, what should they get right first?

I’d strongly advocate for taking the time to come up with a plan for asset consistency, however you can get it. It’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to plan out your whole project’s structure in advance, and realistically, there’s no world where you don’t have to go back and make sweeping changes to your content anyway due to the iterative nature of game development.

Given that, focus on coming up with a basic, extensible file structure and naming convention that you can easily adhere to and that is correct enough to not get in your way for a while. That consistency in your content will be a huge boon in the long term; not only does it let you build robust tools as you discover you need them, but it also makes it much easier to automate systemic changes when moving to whatever newer and better structure you land on as your game matures.

↓ Technical Art by Brendon Vitz

From there, if you’ve got a little more time and energy, automating file creation, saving, and exporting to enforce whatever naming system you’ve come up with is a great next step. This will greatly speed up your pipeline for new assets, which is crucial for early exploration, and ensure you don’t have to constantly battle inevitable typos undermining the value of organizing everything.

These efforts provide a really strong backbone for your project, help you onboard new people, and future-you will be really grateful when you don’t have to go back through a thousand source files by hand to clean something up.

Q: Some artists create beautiful work, but their files make everyone else quietly leave the room. What habits make an artist a joy to work with in production?

One of the biggest differences between a production environment and personal work is that someone else is going to have to touch the things you create, either working in the same source file or depending on the things you’ve exported for them.

↓ Screenshot tool by Brendon Vitz

Awesome artists take the time to understand where their art fits into the overall pipeline, and use that knowledge to take a little extra time to make other people’s lives easier. And it’s not just for other folks; in reality, these habits will also save your own butt as things continue to get more complex and chaotic in a project.

• Name components in your files thoughtfully, or at least group them into sensibly labeled bundles. Opening up a file swimming with things named “Layer11” or “pPoly14” sucks and is a nightmare to unpack.
• Learn the rules and expectations of your project’s organization. As mentioned above, consistent file names and locations are incredibly valuable in keeping a project maintainable, but they’re only valuable if they’re actually used everywhere. Ultimately these things should be automated though.
• Test your thing before you check it into the build, even if you only did one last little thing. I’ve broken far too many playtests with a rushed last minute change I thought was safe. Wasting everyone else’s time is far more expensive than the time you save cutting that corner.
• Speak up when your workflow sucks. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I love an artist who complains respectfully. My job is to make your life better, and if I don’t know that someone has to reboot my tool after every export, I can’t fix it. I respect folks who can hack around problems to keep their momentum up, but when they don’t speak up, those hacks silently become permanent fixtures.
• Regularly chat with the folks down and up stream from you. Game development is a massive team effort, and awesome game developers take the time to set and understand expectations with the folks around them. You’re the expert in your domain, so when you take the time to help the teammates you work with understand what you need to thrive and in turn set them up for success with your work everything is just better. Folks who insist on just sitting in their own craft bubble can undermine the whole team.

Q: What is one simple Technical Art habit every young artist should build as early as possible?

Work on building a game developer mindset and be curious about how the whole game comes together; everything you make is part of a big, complex whole, and understanding what niche your work fills is so important.

You don’t have to understand the nuances of game engine code, but spending some time understanding how your work gets into the game and why certain limits or budgets apply can help you do your best work.

↓ Video showcasing Technical Art by Brendon Vitz

Video game production is all about doing awesome creative work within tight constraints and balancing things like production speed, content sustainability, runtime performance, patch sizes, and experience quality.

When you don’t really understand what the possible trade-offs are in something you’re creating, or how it fits into the overall game’s vision, you lose the ability to maximize the impact of your work.

By taking the time to truly grok the creative and technical vision of your project, you can see past the little problems right in front of you and become empowered to contribute to the overall game in amazing new ways.

Q: Technical Art skills are no longer limited to games. Where else do you see these skills creating value?

I wouldn’t say Technical Art was ever really a skill set limited to games. Even before games were an industry, Technical Directors were doing essentially the same role in film, bridging the gap between art and technology. I’ve worked with quite a few awesome Technical Artists who actually came over to games from filmmaking, and their knowledge was immediately applicable.

That being said, computer graphics are fundamentally everywhere now, and the skills we develop in empowering rapid prototyping and production of digital creative assets are valuable in those places. It turns out getting something from an idea to implemented visuals is an evergreen problem in a lot of ways.

↓ Video showcasing Technical Art by Brendon Vitz

Whether you’re mocking up architecture renders, creating robust pipelines for virtual productions, or hyper-optimizing content for mobile AR experiences, having someone who understands both what high-quality art looks like and the technical pieces that bring it to life is invaluable.

Creating digital art efficiently and scalably is incredibly complex and valuable across many industries, and TAs are well poised to tackle those problems with their broad skill sets and relentless curiosity.

Q: Why do AAA studios invest so much in Technical Art? Where do they get that investment back?

Fundamentally, Technical Artists are force multipliers, using their breadth of game-making knowledge to empower others through automation, optimization, and communication. This means the value they provide increases dramatically as the team and project complexity scale up.

AAA studios inherently work at these large scales, where adding one more artist to a team of fifty might be much less cost-effective than hiring a Technical Artist to make all your other artists 10% faster.

For example, if you have one artist responsible for making five simplified characters, anything beyond the bare minimum of automation wouldn’t pay itself back. But if you’ve got dozens of developers creating hundreds of complex characters for multiple game modes, suddenly minor optimizations can save weeks of wasted effort.

↓ Technical Art by Brendon Vitz

At those scales, it makes financial sense to absorb the large upfront cost of long-tail systems and invest in roles that increase the productivity of your other developers. This can include things like automated validation to catch bugs before they happen, batch exporting tools that let you touch every champion and skin when you update a file format, procedural systems to create thousands of unique assets at a fraction of the cost, or just having someone alongside your artists whom they can turn to for help when things inevitably go sideways.

Beyond the force multiplication aspect, AAA studios are also the ones who generally have access to the funds required to pursue projects with cutting-edge visuals, and Technical Art is instrumental in making that happen. TAs are uniquely capable of tying together engineering and art teams in pursuit of these incredibly challenging problems, and they frequently help lead the charge in prototyping new systems before converting them to a repeatable pipeline.

Depending on the problems at hand, this can include things like developing new shaders, animation technologies, procedural tools, or precise performance budgets. When it comes to delivering gorgeous art to your screen, there are few folks who understand the whole picture like a Technical Artist.