Greg Dismond - Technical Artist, Perspectives and Viewpoints

Today, we invited Greg Dismond, a senior Technical Director in Electronic Arts who has been in industry around 20 years, to our elective class. He has given us Perspectives and Viewpoints on being a Technical Artist. Through his talk, he has cleared our understanding of Technical Artist, stimulated our creative thinking, and encouraged our motivation exploring our future career.

Greg started with how different are engineers from artists. Ones are technical, while the other ones are artistic. Enable to let engineers and artists work efficiently together, communication between these two is very important. He pointed out that hybrids are highly needed to connect those two parties with their technical and artistic skills. Also, Greg brought up this fact that lots of hybrids are struggling between being artists and engineers. As a result, technical artist is a perfect fit for people who are struggling with both technical and artistic talents.

With Greg's experience in movie and game industry, he explained to us what does technical artist/technical director do. Generally, technical artists will be dealing with dependency between different departments, for example, tools, workflow, shaders, general problem solving and assets conditioning plus optimization. It is very inspiring Greg reminded us that being a technical artist requires focusing on "HOW" more than "WHAT". Afterward, he asked everyone to speak up, talk about who they are, are they focusing type or variety type. The result was a little bit surprising for him, focus vs. variety is half and half. Some people are struggling in being focus or variety. For this situation, Greg's suggestion is to start doing something meanwhile think about what fits the most.

As an industry veteran, technical director who has been working in both movies and games, Greg shared his experiences when dealing with different people in work. He started this topic with a rendering question, how to solve a seeming impossible rendering task. With unveiling the answer, Greg gave us tips to face different demanding people and tasks. Be positive, proactive, and attaining social perspective to technical problems.

Lastly, Greg mentioned how landscape of economy also affects our career. He explained how out-sourcing is more and more important, and people with bilingual skill are in high demand. Greg's talk about technical artist is really enlightening, he not only told us what does technical artist like, but also encouraged us to how think about and find out what's best for us.