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Vertex School — Tech Art Program Detailed Curriculum

Sources: the official Tech Art Program page, Tech Art Bootcamp page and the course catalog (compiled 2026-09-26).

Vertex School's technical art training comes in two tiers:

  • Tech Art Program (12 months) — for absolute beginners through intermediate students, from game art foundations all the way to shaders, procedural generation, VFX and tool development
  • Tech Art Bootcamp (18 weeks) — an intensive for students who already have 3D experience

1. Tech Art Program (full 12-month track)

1.1 Overview

Item Details
Length 12 months — 4 terms × 12 weeks
Format 100% online: pre-recorded videos + 2 live classes weekly + 1-on-1 / small-group mentorship + online labs
Time commitment Minimum 20+ hrs/week (30+ recommended); compatible with a full-time job
Admission No prior experience required (junior/intermediate level)
Tuition $13,200 upfront; installments: $2,450/mo × 6, $1,675/mo × 9 or $1,295/mo × 12
Completion Certificate (requested by email) + a portfolio of 4 capstone projects
Next cohort 2026-09-28 (also the final enrollment day)
Application ① online application → ② admissions interview → ③ enroll & pay

Required software (student-provided):

Mentors:

Mentor Position Credits
Hicham Ouchan Procedural Technical Artist, Mob Entertainment Poppy Playtime, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered
Sam Jay Technical Artist, Blizzard Diablo IV, NHL series
William Harvey Senior Technical Artist, Meta Poppy Playtime, Dawn of Defiance

Career outcomes: the program targets technical art roles supporting Environment, Effects and Pipeline teams; the site maintains a "Where our students get jobs" section.

1.2 Term-by-term structure (4 × 12 weeks)

🎨 Term 1 — Game Art Foundations

Goal: master the full "high-res sculpt → game asset → engine render" art pipeline as a base for technical art.

Core content:

  1. High-res sculpting & the game asset workflow
    • ZBrush high-poly sculpting
    • Game-res mesh rebuilding
    • Retopology
    • Normal/AO map baking
  2. UVs & PBR texturing
    • UV conventions
    • Substance Painter PBR workflow
  3. Lighting & rendering
    • Unreal Engine scene lighting and rendering
    • Marmoset Toolbag real-time rendering & portfolio presentation
  4. Production conventions (naming, density, LOD awareness, engine import validation)

Capstone: a game-ready prop with a portfolio-grade breakdown.

🧮 Term 2 — Technical Art Fundamentals (shader math)

Goal: master the math and algorithms behind shaders and proceduralism; express visuals freely in the material editor / code.

Core content:

  1. Coordinate spaces & transforms — UV, world and tangent space; vectors and matrices
  2. Signed distance fields & raymarching
  3. Polar coordinates & trigonometry — swirls, radial patterns, waves
  4. Fractals & recursion
  5. Noise families: value noise, gradient noise, fBM (fractal Brownian motion), Voronoi
  6. Post-process effects: edge detection (convolution), NPR / stylized rendering
  7. Hands-on vehicles: Unreal's material editor, Shadertoy (GLSL), Houdini HDAs

Capstone (choose one):

🛠️ Term 3 — Advanced Technical Art & Tools

Goal: production-grade tech art — dynamic material systems, VFX, the Houdini Engine pipeline and editor tooling.

Core content:

  1. Advanced Unreal material systems
    • Render targets: draw-to-texture, runtime feedback
    • Layered materials / shaders
    • Dynamic masking and runtime parameter driving
  2. Procedural graphs & optimization
  3. Niagara VFX: CPU/GPU particles, modular design
  4. Houdini Engine: attribute-driven Houdini tools inside Unreal
  5. Blueprint editor tools & the PCG framework
    • Blueprint utility / editor scripting tools
    • Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework
  6. Graphics profiling: Stat, Insights, GPU analysis

Capstone: a production-ready tool or shader system (official examples: a Niagara library, a terrain scatter tool).

🌍 Term 4 — Procedural Generation for World Building

Goal: Houdini × Unreal procedural world building — the core production skillset of environment/pipeline TAs at AAA studios.

Core content:

  1. Houdini heightfields → Unreal terrains: generation and import pipeline
  2. Procedural landscape materials: auto layering, runtime virtual texturing
  3. Rock & cliff generation
  4. Foliage scattering & biomes
  5. Rivers & lakes: flow-map-driven water
  6. Building generator HDAs: parametric houses / modular buildings
  7. Trimsheets / atlases in procedural workflows
  8. Procedural cities

Capstone: a Houdini–Unreal integrated procedural world-building toolkit (official examples: a terrain painter, a city builder, a river system).

1.3 Progression logic across the four terms

Term 1 Art pipeline        Term 2 Shader math          Term 3 Tools & systems       Term 4 Procedural worlds
(make game assets)    →    (math + shaders)       →    (build tools & VFX)     →    (build procedural pipelines)
   ZBrush/Maya/SP           Material editor/Shadertoy    Niagara/Houdini Engine        Houdini↔UE dual engine
   UE render/Marmoset        SDF/noise/polar/fractals     Blueprint tools/PCG           terrain/biome/city gen
        ↓                          ↓                           ↓                             ↓
  Capstone: game prop      custom material/shader/HDA   production tool/shader system  Houdini-UE world toolkit

2. Tech Art Bootcamp (18-week intensive)

For students who already have 3D experience; it is the condensed alternative to the 12-month Program.

2.1 Overview

Item Details
Length 18 weeks — 36 live classes (2 per week, ~1–1.5h), all recorded
Current cohort 2026-09-08 → 2027-01-28 (Tue/Thu 8:00–9:30 AM PT); the previous one ran 2026-03-02 → 2026-07-08 (Mon/Wed 12:00–1:30 PM PT) — dates shift per cohort
Admission Beginner / intermediate (3D experience recommended)
Tuition $3,200 upfront (list $4,000); US students: 4 interest-free payments via Klarna/Afterpay, or 3 monthly payments of $1,176
Extras 15-day money-back guarantee, private Mighty community, full-time technical support, certificate
Salary data (cited officially) US technical artist average $138,713/yr; entry ≈ $102,690; senior up to $177,752

Teaching split:

The five official skill goals ("What You'll Master"):

  1. Procedural world-building with Houdini
  2. Shader programming and real-time effects
  3. Technical animation and asset optimization
  4. Production-ready workflows for Unreal Engine 5
  5. Advanced use of Maya and the Substance suite

Software: Visual Studio, Sublime Text, Maya, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Houdini, Unreal Engine 5.4, Fab Marketplace; ZBrush (optional)

2.2 Week-by-week syllabus

Weeks Theme Details
Week 1–2 Intro to programming & the pipeline Programming basics (variables, loops, conditionals, functions); game art pipeline overview; PBR fundamentals
Week 3–4 Intro to game art: modeling, texturing & shaders Polygonal modeling in Maya; Substance Painter texturing; Unreal shaders/materials; intro to GLSL
Week 5–6 Intro to proceduralism: texturing & modeling Procedural texturing in Substance Designer; custom noise in HLSL/GLSL; procedural modeling & tool-building in Houdini
Week 7–10 Effects focus: real-time VFX (Niagara & Houdini) Niagara particle systems; advanced customization with scripts, modules, HLSL; creating/exporting effects from Houdini into Unreal; profiling & VFX optimization
Week 11–14 Environment focus: world building Procedural terrain in Houdini; Unreal landscape materials; PCG tools & Houdini Engine; foliage scattering & biome painting; large-scale environment optimization
Week 15–18 Capstone project (~4 weeks) A portfolio project aligned with your career goals + mentor feedback, iteration, optimization, portfolio presentation, job search / interview / networking advice

Past capstone examples (from official blogs/videos — see the Resources page):

3.1 Other career programs

Program Length Content
Game Art Program 9 months Game art (character or environment specialization)
Game Dev Program 9 months Unreal Blueprints, C++ and Python game development
Course Length Notes
Tech Art Bootcamp 18 weeks See above (waitlist status at collection time)
Substance Designer 5 weeks PBR workflow, tiling textures, node-based materials for UE5
Unreal Game Dev Bootcamp 6 weeks A playable demo without code
Video Game Lighting Bootcamp 16 weeks Game lighting (Maria Yue, ex-Splash Damage)
Houdini FX (on-demand) 9 modules Houdini FX
Realtime FX in Unreal Engine (on-demand) 9 modules Full Houdini → UE4 effects pipeline
Coding for Creatives (on-demand) 6 modules Free intro to programming for artists
Environment Art Bootcamp 14 weeks AAA environment art (Jacob Claussen)
Advanced Environment Art (on-demand) 8 modules UE + photogrammetry

4. Study advice (interpretation of the official syllabus)

  1. Zero background: take the 12-month Tech Art Program; don't skip Term 1 — a TA's value is "art + code".
  2. Already 3D-savvy: go straight to the 18-week Bootcamp; focus on programming (variables/loops/functions in weeks 1–2) and shader math (HLSL/GLSL).
  3. Self-study mapping (free stand-ins):
    • Term 2 → The Book of Shaders, Shadertoy, Inigo Quilez's articles
    • Term 3 → Epic's Niagara / PCG docs, Houdini Engine docs
    • Term 4 → SideFX Labs tutorials, Houdini heightfield series
  4. Portfolio strategy: four capstones = four portfolio pieces; align capstone topics with your target role (environment TA / effects TA / pipeline TA).

Note: compiled from official public pages (2026-09-26). The week-by-week detail of the 12-month Program is only in the official Syllabus PDF behind an opt-in form; the Bootcamp week-by-week table above is fully public.