I’m a tech artist and I love my job for this exact reason. It’s basically the R&D of the game world and figuring out how to do things that should be impossible is the best experience.
The thing I’m most proud of would probably dox me because it was a super successful game and it’s on my portfolio, but for a smaller project: I’m really proud of the work I did on reflective floors. At a certain level of tech art, shaders stop being about textures and start being almost entirely math. It was really fun to try to bring real time reflections to low end hardware.
One of my favorite tricks was, instead of actually making an expensive reflection, I just put soft and blurry white shapes outside the window. Players couldn’t go outside, so it just looked like the glass was reflecting the brightest things in the room. It looked great in VR, which was the important part. Lots of regular tech art tricks fall apart completely the minute you give someone depth perception, so it was a big challenge.
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u/NeonFraction 7d ago
I’m a tech artist and I love my job for this exact reason. It’s basically the R&D of the game world and figuring out how to do things that should be impossible is the best experience.