Technical art roles: What they are, and how to get one

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This article is part of our Get into Games special , offering students insight on life in the games industry and advice on how to get into the business

Of the myriad roles available in the games industry, an artist is perhaps one of the easiest positions for outsiders to understand. Programmers, too, do pretty much what they say on the tin. But technical artists? The people who span both those worlds and build the tools to turn art into fully realised assets and characters in video games? Well, that's a little more complicated.

During an EGX 2023 talk, the technical art team at Radical Forge – including Calvin Simpson (former principal technical artist, now CEO of Blueshift Interactive), Anthony Marmont (senior tools engineer), and Piotr Sidorowicz (junior technical artist) – joined CEO Bruce Slater and Liquid Crimson's head of comms, Lauran Carter, to explain exactly what technical artistry is, and how budding developers can forge a career in it.

According to CEO Slater, who started out as a technical artist, there are two types of technical art:

Front end: visual effects and shaders ("making art look good," as he put it)

Back end: Tool tech and pipeline management (or "getting art into the game" and "making sure that the workflow to get things from A to B is efficient").

Interestingly, Slater said that even within these two different types of technical art roles, there are "a lot of sub-sectors", too, so what one tech artist does can vary wildly from another, not just in a different studio, but even inside the very same company.

Sidorowicz started as a 3D artist and now works as a 'front end' technical artist with shaders and effects following a serendipitous meeting with CEO Slater when skateboarding. Their experience with modelling "was a good foot in the door" when it came to landing the role.

"It's a very good foundation to have," Sidorowicz said. "You can come from a programming background or an art background, and for me, it was art. Once you model, that's one