If you ask multiple technical artists what they do, the chances are you'll get very different responses. Although there are generalists, it is more often an umbrella that encompasses a number of specialist disciplines such as environment, shaders, VFX, and pipeline, to name just a few, so you could be involved more with the front-end or the back-end. Naturally, this also varies hugely from studio to studio. However, if we're to explain the essence of the role, then Jodie Azhar, technical art director at Silver Rain Games says: "Technical artists are problem solvers." "Quite often they will be creating tools to solve these problems, for instance creating a procedural system to save time for an environment artist from doing very repetitive tasks. It also involves being the bridge between the art and programming sides of game development. "They can act like translators between artists and programmers," she adds. "They need to understand artists' processes and how they want something to ...

I wasn't really aware as a kid that game development was a career that I could have, especially from an artist's perspective." Pinnick is a VR Technical Artist for Google, where she's working on Playground, the company's augmented reality app. But three years ago, she was an art school graduate and self-taught virtual reality developer with an uncertain future at her feet. "I was playing games and I knew that there was art there," Pinnick said. "I just didn't put two and two together." Before graduating in 2015, Pinnick carved a unique path for herself at ArtCenter College of Design, a school that offered traditional art training but hadn't yet embraced programming as a creative outlet. In her final semester, it seemed like the school might never include game design in its degree offerings -- some teachers didn't even know how to hold a video game controller, let alone create an interactive, digital experience. "It's just not in their wheelhouse," Pinnick said in 2015.