What does a technical artist do?

A technical artist?

Well, optimization, like, looking so everything works.

It's a pretty broad role as well, like, fixing materials, making materials, and, fuck, we have... Fuck?

Don't fuck.

It's a good job.

Yeah.

Fixing stuff, like, aid artists, maybe, if they need something.

Just, yeah.

So sometimes you have to take the other artist's stuff and then try to make them more optimized?

Is that a thing?

Yeah, and make loads for stuff, maybe.

It could be so much different things as well.

You did a lot of loading.

Yeah, when I started, we had...

I went through 800 objects or some shit like that.

800 or 900 objects.

You fuck, bro?

No.

I'm a fucking game dev, okay?

And then...

Yeah, like 900 objects or something.

I just went through them and made LODs for them.

That's crazy.

I appreciate some of them.

I made some shitty LODs.

The game is better.

Yeah, it does.

For those of you who don't know, LOD is level of detail.

It's like when you're moving away from an object, we reduce the poly count on them.

We load in a lower poly count object or model so that you don't really need a lot of polys when you're far away from it.

And Simon did a lot of them manually.

We've generated some of them.

Yeah.

You've probably seen them before in games.

Sometimes as you walk closer to something, it'll just pop in.

There are ways to get around the pop, but if you've seen that before, that's just a different LOD.

That was probably

me.

Yeah.

And there is so much stuff to do.

I really enjoy helping with modeling and stuff like that as well, sculpting and stuff.

Well, now I want to be a technical artist, says Chris McClam.

Do it.

Follow your heart.

You can do it.