Before I get to the main topic, I’d first like to explain how this article came about.
During the summer semester of 2026, I had the opportunity to teach the elective course “Technical Art” as part of the “Virtual Worlds and Game Technologies” program at Offenburg University of Applied Sciences. Throughout the course, we covered various topics that might be of interest to technical artists. As part of their final assessment, all students were required to write a term paper on a project of their own in the context of technical art. Although grading was based exclusively on the written documentation, I had advised them to also submit the actual project files. That way, if a description in the text was unclear, I could check directly within the project. I was really pleased to see how diverse the projects turned out to be. Everything was represented, from workflow tools to real-time VFX. One of the projects, which was implemented using the Unreal Engine, included a file with the extension .t3d as an attachment. 
