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About & Contribute

This is the site I wish I had when I was first trying to work out what a technical artist actually does. The aim is simple: useful notes, clear examples, and tools you can come back to years later.

The Philosophy

  • Free means free. No accounts, no paywalls, no "sign up to download." This stuff should be easier to get into, not harder.
  • Client-side means private. The browser tools run in your tab. Your files are not uploaded, and the site does not care what your assets are called. View source if you want to check.
  • No gatekeeping. You do not need a degree, a AAA credit, or anyone's permission. Plenty of TAs are artists who learned to code, or programmers who learned how art pipelines really work.
  • Useful beats polished. The breakdowns include the messy bits, the salary page is honest about fuzzy data, and the production stories are there because they teach something.
  • The site should feel like a TA built it. Static HTML, a Python build script, JSON data, browser tools, and practical examples. Nothing clever for the sake of looking clever.

Contribute

Want to pitch in? The most useful things are small and specific: a VEX or Python snippet with one line on when to use it, a missing glossary term, a correction where an engine changed under us, or a production story that teaches a lesson.

Send it to hello@thetechnicalartist.dev. Include how you want to be credited, or say if you would rather stay anonymous. Both are fine.

Suggest A Tool

Every tool in the collection started as an annoying little job that kept coming back. Pitch yours in three lines: what is annoying, what you wish the tool did, and whether it could run in a browser tab or from a tiny helper script. If that sounds possible, send it over.

Changelog

DateWhat shipped
2026-07-06PBR Map Generator tool - Drop in one source image and build starter PBR maps - base color, height, normal, roughness, AO, and packed ORM/mask - with a live WebGL preview and a ZIP export. It all stays in the browser.
2026-07-05Jobs board goes live - A searchable games jobs board fed by local crawlers across 1,000+ studios, with a cleanup pass for titles, locations, and departments before anything goes live.
2026-07-05Learning tracks and portfolio projects - Learning tracks that connect the existing guides into a path, plus project briefs you can actually build and show.
2026-07-04Simplygon section - A practical Simplygon section: what it is, how to run it from Python, how to use it in Maya, and the small tips that save a lot of pain.
2026-07-03Houdini Digital Assets, its own guide - The HDA lifecycle in plain terms: build it, expose the right controls, edit it safely, version it, and get it into a team pipeline.
2026-07-02Nine browser tools - Texel density, naming, poly budgets, colour ramps, UV grids, channel packing, tileable noise, normal maps, and Unreal asset checks. All client-side, nothing uploads.
2026-07-01Career and Field Notes launch - A practical route into the job: portfolio, resume, interview prep, salary, studio survival, version control, printable cheat sheets, and the first build breakdown.

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