A big part of a tech artist’s role is problem solving anywhere within the pipeline. Below are a few examples where I contributed solutions to actual problems on mobile game projects.

At the time, adding or changing  artwork in existing Unity projects was a slow process involving both the artist and tech artist. An artist would use scripts to export from Photoshop, but the tech artist would be responsible for assembling the art into a sprite atlas, then reassembling the sprites exactly the same in Unity. This is a slow process and prone to mistakes.

Request: Create a process in which the artist can simply export art and not worry if it will be placed in Unity correctly, while removing that responsibility from tech artists. Also, art updates and changes need to be streamlined.

Solution: We decided to use Spine between Photoshop and Unity. Since a lot of art is rigged and animated in Spine anyway, we wanted to take advantage of Spine’s ability to automatically assemble art  from Photoshop. Using Spine’s Photoshop export scripts we export all the art in layer comps along with JSON datafiles describing placement. From there we open the art and datafiles in Spine, then rig & animate if needed. Exporting from Spine we get a sprite atlas and other datafiles. Importing these into Unity, we have perfect prefabs positioned and ready to go. If there are changes, the artist re-exports from Photoshop, re-exports from Spine and drops in the assets. The tech artist does not need to assist.