Technical Artist - New York

Description

Framestore VR Studio is looking for an experienced Technical Artist to join our team to work on groundbreaking VR and AR projects. The ideal candidate will have a thorough understanding of art and animation pipelines as well as the content creation pipeline in Unreal and/or Unity.

The Technical Artist ensures that art assets can be brought into engine without sacrificing the artistic vision of the project or exceeding its technical limitations. Working closely with the CG Lead and the Lead Developer, they will be proactive in investigating and implementing new techniques in engine that will contribute to the success of the project at hand and the team in general.

We are looking for someone who is an excellent collaborator, with a broad base of art and technical knowledge and is excited about creating compelling VR experiences. A high level of technical knowledge combined with strong creative and visual instincts is critical.

Candidates who have experience in both games and VFX are of particular interest to us.

Responsibilities:

The candidate is responsible for setting up and maintaining the art production workflow into engine, including but not limited to:

  • Ensuring assets are correctly imported into the engine.

  • Debugging and investigating problems with assets in engine.

  • Communicating procedures back to the rest of the team, and proactively reacting to issues and communicating solutions.

  • Collaboration with programmers to develop and test new features within the project.

 

Requirements:

  • A deep understanding of Unreal Engine 4 and Unity engine features affecting the scene and scene assets, including but not limited to:

    • Lighting: the available options, their properties, benefits, and performance characteristics.

    • Asset organisation.

    • Scene optimisation.

    • Post processing options; their uses, benefits, and performance characteristics.

    • Unreal blueprint knowledge and Unity C# Scripting

    • Available and upcoming features.

  • Should be comfortable authoring materials. Must have a good knowledge of materials in UE4 and Unity and be able to author functional and performant materials.

    • A methodical approach to material development is essential.

    • Must be able to debug materials for functionality and performance.

    • Must understand physically based shading and be able to communicate assets requirements to the asset creation team.

  • Be able to collaborate with programmers to develop and test new features.

  • Should have an extensive knowledge of all art packages directly related to creation of engine assets, and be able to customise those packages to streamline the asset pipeline and add new features.

    • For example, the ability to script Mel/Python in Maya.

  • Good communication and people management skills are essential. Must be able to listen to the art and programming teams to identify requirements and work with them to develop solutions.

  • Must be able to take technical direction from the development lead and artistic direction from the creative lead, and work with both to proactively resolve any conflicts.

 

Desirable Skills and Experience:

  • Advance experience of Unreal's Blueprints system.

  • Advanced experience with Maya and Houdini.

  • Comfortable in a range of content creation software including Photoshop, Zbrush/Mudbox, Substance Painter.

  • Experience creating content for VR/AR.

  • Maya Rigging experience.

  • Shader programming experience.

  • Advanced Scripting skills with MEL, Python, C#, Javascript and C++

Framestore VR