Andy Davis is one of our headliners this Industry week, and
it is clear why, Andy is multi-talented and was quick to showcase his abilities
during the session today. Andy is currently a technical artist at the world
renowned studio Rockstar Games and has worked on many titles, some of which
include Max Payne 3 and some from the Lego series.
As normal, Andy started off by wowing us all by his academic
success, it all kicked off in 1991 when Andy took his BA Hons in Architecture
and also studied BTEC’S in Music Technology and Computer Aided design, it is
also worth noting that he took part in a band, but was more interested in the
behind the scenes than playing!
He stepped it up a notch between the years of 1997 and 1999
where he studied an MSC in Computer Aided Graphical Technology Application.
Already having this brain of excellence by this age, it was only fitting that
he would go onto big things, and he did just that.
Although before he made it big, he worked in other studios
such as Magenta Software located in Liverpool, he also worked on titles such as
Lego Starwars, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Harry Potter and Lego Rockband,
although these are considered large titles, he still went on to bigger things.
During his time on the Lego projects, he devised a tool which made construction
animation of Lego assets easy, and it looked amazing.
After hearing all of this I was intrigued to hear what the
role of Technical artist consisted off, because it sounded easy to start with,
how wrong was I? Nothing ever comes easy!
“A bridge between the art and the code” our headliner said,
he went into such detail about how much would be required of a technical
artist, such examples of software, programming languages and specific skill
sets you must have to excel in this position.
Some software included, Autodesk 3DS Max and Maya and Photoshop, while
some programming/scripting language include Mal, MaxScript and Python.
Rather amazingly, this wasn’t all he also spoke about, he
discussed the rather important yet still small jobs he could be expected to do
during production, some of these jobs include optimisation, which is exceptionally
important to make things look good with limitations in place, to help make the
game run smoothly without any problems such as crashing. He would also have to
keep documentation of any tools that he made or help to maintain the companies
Wiki.
This opportunity was great for all aspiring Technical
Artists, Andy went into such detail about his job and gave a clear overview of
his role, and this is pretty much considered golden, as not a lot of people
would do such a thing.
I thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to sit in on a session
with someone with such prestige, Industry week can only get better and better,
and this was only the first day! There is sure more to come!
Thank you once again for reading this blog.
By Nick Mason, Level 3 Games Student
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