Creating and Exploring Worlds: Researching to become a Technical Artist

• Carson Dunn, Computer Science, University of Delaware

• Lance Winn, Art, University of Delaware

Within a game studio, there can be disconnections between the artists and those working on the game itself. Issues can arise when incorporating assets into a game in progress, and difficulties from other creative disciplines that are unable to easily implement their work. The Technical Artist is an interdisciplinary job that tackles these issues. To better understand and specialize as a game developer, we produced both a game and documentation in order to recreate and solve problems that Technical Artists would be expected to resolve. With our research, several landscapes were put together, as well as creating tools for potential developers to use in order to demonstrate the broad possibilities of the role. Focuses were directed toward graphics and 3D art implementation, tackling often difficult technical problems that appear in a game’s production cycle. Examples of this include researching how games render grass, and using several implementations, gauging their effectiveness and scalability, as well as researching how games create terrain and landscapes, whether they should be done procedurally, artistically, or a combination of both. As a result, two deliverables have been produced. One is a playable and explorable tech demo that showcases various designed environments. Everything in this tech demo was hand-made in Blender, a 3D modeling application, and then implemented into Godot, a game engine. Additionally, documentation outlining the details for every step of this project, such as resources and thought processes, was created.