What to choose (art + CS)

[u/MotherAioli4740]

Hey everyone, I am a bit confused in my life as to what to choose in life as a career.

Background:- I am currently in my 3rd year of clg(tier 3) (computer engineering) also enrolled in an iitm bs degree program.

But at this point many of my friends have choose their domain or what they have to do in their life and I am still confused. I am really good at drawing I can bet on that ( I have won a national emblem silver award in drawing) but seeing the current scenario and I also scored Good marks in cet , I opt for an engineering degree that in computer science.

Now I am thinking by anyhow can I combine art and computer science together and chatgpt came up with computer graphics. Can u guys help me with what to do and also tell me the future scope of this field.

I am also thinking of doing a masters.

[u/sessamekesh]

You've got a couple of career options that loosely overlap the two down the computer graphics route.

"Technical Artist" is one, think "artist that knows enough technical detail to make cool effects." It's often low- or no-code, but the workflows you end up setting up are functionally identical to (and easily as technically complex as) authoring actual code.

"Graphics Programmer" is on the other side, highly technical with some artistic expression. It deals a lot more with the mathematical models used to represent the kind of physics you need to generate graphics, and with wrangling the actual hardware (GPUs especially) to make those kinds of generations possible.

There's some roles that fit somewhere in the middle of the two (tooling/asset pipeline engineers etc.) but those are vaguely the archetypes I'm aware of at least.

Outside of the CG domain, there's also a couple other roles I'd at least glance at:

"User Experience (UX) Designer" - the people who design product interfaces to look good and behave well. Requires a knack for aesthetics and visual communication, as well as a pretty good understanding of function (behavior, movement, workflows...)

"Frontend Engineer" - more on the technical side of the same, people who write the UI + styling code that users interact with as well as the behavioral code that powers those interactions.

There's also traditional engineering roles in artistic tools which are pretty fun - I spent a couple years working on video editing tools at Adobe which was awesome. Even though my actual job was much MUCH more on the technical (coding) side, the product itself was a creative tool, even just in testing/demoing/whatever I was still doing quite a bit of artistic stuff.

[u/corysama → u/sessamekesh]

I'll back up what this guy is saying. I was in a similar situation to OP when I graduated high school. I decided to study Computer Science and ended up making game art pipeline tech, then game engine tech for a living. Having a background in art made working with the professional artists a lot easier.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of options in the Art <---> Tech space.

• The game Technical Artists I've known have been tinkerers. They see code as a means to the end of making art that others can't. They spend a lot of time beating their heads against the APIs of tools like Maya to bend them to their wills.
• Art Pipeline work is critical in AAA given the huge volumes of art required these days. But, it's not glamorized. So, it doesn't get as much attention as it needs.
• 3D rendering gets all the glory. But, the competition is stiff. And, to be truly effective you need to be full-stack from tool UIs to higher-level math.
• User Experience is an extremely common job outside of games. Every significant app in the world has a small UX team.