Lead Technical Artist
Skills
C#Art DirectionCoding StandardsGame DevelopmentOpengl Shading LanguageOptimizationOptimization Techniques
What the job involves
The main requirements, responsibilities and hiring steps.
Requirements
- Proven experience as a lead technical artist on games developed in Unreal Engine or similar game engines
- A keen eye for visual focus, quality and an understanding of how to follow and uphold key art direction and vision
- Teaching and mentoring proficiency in scripting languages such as Mel, PyMel, PyQT, Python, C# and LUA
- Experience with or exposure to high level shader languages such as glsl, hlsl and cgfx with the ability to optimize surfacing
- Demonstrable experience with performance tracking in games
- Expert understanding and significant experience of different platform requirements
- Excellent knowledge in modern content creation applications (Maya, Substance, Z-brush, Houdini, Photoshop, etc)
- Deep experience of end-to-end modern development pipelines in 3D asset creation, VFX and animation
- Ability to script and plan code for efficient re-use and extensibility adhering to coding standards. Proven experience of optimization techniques and robust memory budget management
- Ideally, your portfolio should showcase an artistic background that supports strong visual decision making, as well as tools, scripts and documentation
Nice to have
- Proven experience as a lead technical artist
- Understanding of how to follow and uphold key art direction
- Proficiency in scripting languages such as Mel, PyMel, PyQT
- Experience with high level shader languages
- Experience with performance tracking in games
- Experience of different platform requirements
- Knowledge in modern content creation applications
- Experience of end-to-end development pipelines in 3D asset creation
- Ability to script and plan code efficiently
- Experience of optimization techniques and memory budget management
Day to day
- Lead & foster the development of a team of technical artists of different levels of experience
- Drive quality standards and ensure all content is meeting technical specifications while hitting the art direction criteria
- Lead others on best practice, including defining and documenting game or engine technical specifications and driving workflow optimizations
- Strategically plan and deliver professional quality tools and scripts for art packages (Python, MEL, Z-script) or tools that extend to the game engine
- Author and maintain scripts, tools, or documentation for external asset production
- Ensure all tools have streamlined UX with re-usable modular components, highly adaptable controls together with clear documentation
- Build, document, and maintain a robust framework on which to build the game's foundation (folder structures, naming conventions, etc)
- Support the teams rapid prototyping and problem solving from a technical perspective
- Lead the definition of specifications and strategic planning for a games graphical technology, tooling, and performance
- Be the ‘go to' technical expertise point of contact between code and art, feeding back to the game engineers on system needs and improvements
- Effectively debug and correct very complex, interconnected problems with cross discipline dependencies
- Investigate and champion new techniques that push visual innovation whilst adhering to art direction and game engine parameters
Hiring process
- Interview process with discussions about working schedules