Accidental Coder Part 3: What is a TD
I started at Nerd Corps Entertainment as a Render Wrangler on the production "League of Super Evil". They worked on kids animated TV series and at the time were fully on a Softimage XSI pipeline.
A render wrangler's core responsibility was to:
- Submit jobs to render all the 3D elements in a given animation shot
- Collect those renders and roughly composite them together into a 2D frame sequence (this was called pre-comp)
- Check frame-by-frame for any issues - a common one being geometry penetration. If there are issues:
- Kick them back to an appropriate department (often Animation)
- ...or fix them yourself (e.g. rotoscoping)
It got mind numbing, and fast. It was an entry level role after all.
One day, the custom UI tool I was using did not behave as expected. My team lead referred me to get help from our TDs. What is a TD...? I wondered.
The TDs, Technical Directors, turned out to be two nice folks who could just fix about anything with "code" - more like magic.
It felt like they were wielding a different class of creativity. "I want to do that" - I thought.
But how? Do I go back to school? Learn on the job? I had only a few months of work experience.
By the 6th month at the studio, they started giving me some Compositing tasks. While it was a breath of fresh air it wasn't the kind of problems that those TDs were solving.
I quit. One of the leaders was surprised and asked me if I was sure, and that most people try to accumulate at least 2 years of experience before moving on. I was actually full of doubt - diving head first into what could, (and would) turn out to be years of unemployment.
But, I needed to focus on the immediate thing at hand - how does one learn this coding thing?
Continue to Read Part 4.