Fusing Tech & Art in Games

And how are tech artists pushing the boundaries and creating new experiences for players? Find out in this discussion from ALD 2021.

The Technical Artist is a new kind of role in the games industry, but the possibilities for those who create and merge art and technology is endless. So what is tech art? And how are tech artists pushing the boundaries and creating new experiences for players?

Ada Lovelace Day and Ukie’s #RaiseTheGame invite you to join tech artist Kristrun Fridriksdottir, Jodie Azhar, technical art director at Silver Rain Games, Emma Roseburgh from Avalanche Studios, and Laurène Hurlin from Pixel Toys for our tech art webinar.

About our speakers

Kristrun Fridriksdottir

In games, Kristrun’s experience ranges from start-up games studios to well established AAA studios. Outside of games, Kristrun has worked in commercials, apps, animation, film and as a university teacher. Working in departments ranging from 3D modelling, rigging and technical art. With three degrees in IT, games and anatomy, working as a technical artist allows Kristrun to utilize all three degrees.The wide range of skillset, art to programming transfers well to tech art. Now, Kristrun has recently started up her own games studio, and is currently hard at work building the company’s first prototype. In her spare time, Kristrun founded a non profit, organizing free to attend games industry events.

Website: kristrunf.weebly.com
LinkedIn: kristrun-f

Jodie Azhar

Jodie Azhar is the Technical Art Director at Silver Rain Games working on their as yet unannounced debut title. She is also an indie developer creating narrative driven games at her own company Teazelcat Games.

Prior to this she spent a decade working as a technical artist at various game development studios in the UK including Kuju, Rebellion, and as the Technical Art Director for the Total War franchise. These roles have seen her work on many different areas of technical art including pipeline development, tool development, shader authoring, procedural animation and rigging.

She’s an award winning developer and was a BAFTA Breakthrough in 2016. Her commitment to supporting and enabling current and future game developers and creating an inclusive industry has led to her involvement with BAFTA as a member of both their Games Committee and Learning, Inclusion, and Talent Committee, and she’s also a founding member of the games diversity movement POC in Play.

Twitter: @JodieAzhar

Emma Roseburgh

Emma Roseburgh is an Experienced Technical artist at Avalanche Studios in Stockholm. Before moving to Sweden she worked at Rebellion and Splash Damage in England. She has a bachelors degree in 3D Games Art from the University of Hertfordshire. In her third year she realised that she wanted to be involved in the technical side of game development while still putting her knowledge of art to good use and found that technical art suited that role perfectly.

The titles she has worked on include: Dirty Bomb, Gears of War 4 DLC, Gears:Tactics, Gears 5, Zombie Army 4 and a few unannounced projects. As a technical artist a lot of her work has been performance focused but after finding her feet in the role she found her favourite tasks are upkeeping tools involved in the artist pipeline to make the artists job as smooth as possible.

Website: roseburgh.co.uk

Twitter: @emmaroseburgh

LinkedIn: emma-roseburgh-2947a7107

Laurène Hurlin

After studying fine arts, Laurène set off to learn the skills to embody that art within computers. This is how they started to focus on real-time 3D rendering, bringing both their art sensibility and their nerdiness to the video games industry. Thus, they started their career in VR/AR and small indie games, to later join bigger projects such as Life Beyond, Twin Mirror and other unannounced titles. Becoming a technical artist felt like the obvious path to them, as they love enabling artists to make all of their visions reality.

Using Houdini was the next step, providing teams with powerful world-building toolsets, used in Life Beyond and other unannounced projects. They also intervene in other areas such as shader and look dev or optimisation, but their most important task will always be supporting their colleagues to do their best work.

Twitter: @laurene_hu
LinkedIn: laurenehurlin

About Ukie & #RaiseTheGame

Ukie is the trade association for the UK’s games and interactive entertainment industry; a not-for-profit, representing businesses from micro studios to multinationals, developers, publishers and service companies, working across online, mobile, console, PC, esports and immersive. It’s UKIE’s mission to make the UK the best place to make, sell and play games. You can find out more about UKIE on their website at ukie.org.uk.

The #RaiseTheGame pledge is a holistic driven initiative managed and facilitated by Ukie aimed at helping the overall UK games industry grow and improve in all areas of equality, diversity and inclusivity. From guidance and practical advice to engagement activities like events both online and in-person, the pledge is a call to action to rally the sector together and become lead examples of inclusion to other industries.

Though the pledge is managed by Ukie, any games industry company can applied to sign-up and be involved in activities surrounding the pledge, all that is asked is a strong commitment to make a positive impact, the time to listen and consider along with the effort to implement such change. Even if you’re at the start of your journey or think your company too small to make a difference – all companies no matter their size or where they are in their equality, diversity & inclusion journey are welcome.

Websites: raisethegame.com and ukie.org.uk
Twitter: Uk_ie