Environment artists are integral in sculpting the moment-to-moment experience, creating moods with shape, color, texture, and light, and they can generate story without speaking a word. They can lead the player somewhere exciting, or infer the dangers of what lies ahead. And they can do all of this while keeping the game running in framerate, within memory budgets, and still able to create amazing art.
We’re looking for an Environment Artist that’s ready to grow! Maybe you’ve been creating background art, know all the new techniques and software that help create, worked with optimization tools, but you want to challenge yourself to do more. You’ve worked with QA and used playtest data to make a more solid experience. What is more? Where do you take your skills? What do you want to do with your talents?
We’re looking for someone to set up our background art pipeline as well as create and implement environment art for a uniquely-stylized game. Being that we’re a smaller team the position will require you to embrace challenges, know how to get the ‘bang for your buck,’ and love helping others. You’ll need to be a self-starter, enjoy problem solving, have a good eye for style and shape, and understand what emotions or design priorities the game is trying to get across at any given moment. We can help you with some of that, but we’re relying on you to bring your passion and skills too.
Practically speaking, you’ll be responsible for texturing, shading, modeling and lighting a scene, and you will work closely with the rendering team to create the tools and infrastructure necessary to support a functioning background production pipeline. You’ll also be responsible for balancing our technical engine limitations with the demands of our aesthetic targets, and communicate those findings and lessons to the rest of the team.
You will be working closely with pretty much everyone (did I mention we’re not very big?)!
Some Useful Skills:
- Excellent modeler, texture/shader artist, and lighting artist.
- Understands occlusion and collision systems, and AI Navigation tech.
- Understands how to translate and work within design metrics and design limitations into great art and experiences.
- Has a good eye for composition. Knows when and where to add detail, shapes, color, and light to get the best out of our limited resources.
- Understands engine limitations and how to work within those constraints. Has a firm understanding of debugging tools.
- Absolutely loves the player and wants them to feel something when they move through your creations.
- A willingness (even a desire) to iterate and collaborate to find what works best for the team and our aesthetic goals.
- Problem solver, self starter, and proactive. Positive attitude. Good communicator, No ego. Pretty much a perfect person. ;)
- Understands Design’s needs and is willing to compromise when the time comes.
- Up to speed on all the new whiz-bang tech and software.
Special Powers:
- You live and breathe Unreal.
- You can write your own tools.
Super Double Bonus Powers:
- You have good design instincts or have experience with layout design (examples will be requested).
Just a heads up - as part of the interview process, we may ask you to take a test to show us your skills and knowledge.
Thank you for your interest!