Artist-coders iteration

1. Artists gather references
2. Coders gather knowledge
3. Artists make prototypes - visual targets in DCC applications
   
4. Coders find a procedural way to create the same effect
5. Artists iterate with the existing technology
6. If existing tech is not enough, coders improve it, and we return to point 5

Everything trying always to communicate, and work together. Most coders think that artists should be limited or constrained so they can't end up using too many resources or doing too crazy things.
That's completely wrong, the real key is to always explain how things work, what are the limits, and to make tools that can easily and interactively profile the cost of a scene while it's being worked.
Artists have the great gift to find new and incredible ways to tweak parameters to make our technology reach limits that we did not even foresee. They will usually try only to achieve a given visual target, but they are more than able to optimize on performaces as well, if we make easy for them to have a feedback about that.

On the other hand many times artist won't trust coders as well. They will always ask to have more control, just in case they need to tweak something. Usually they will be more happy to achieve an effect using textures and vertices, stuff they can manipulate, instead of algorithms and procedures. They have to learn that some effects are cheaper and way better and easier to do procedurally, instead of craft them by hand.

Cross-contamination is fundamental. Artists that know how to write scripts and shaders will find that many tasks are incredibly easier to do with coding. Coders that know 3d and 2d applications will find that many algorithms are easy to visually prototype in those applications. We really do need coder-artists and artist-coders. Procedural art is the only way we can author such huge amounts of contents that are required for next-gen games, and are also our best bet of rendering all that with decent performances (as ALU is cheaper than data access).