Studio: Naughty Dog
Job Opening: Lead Environment Concept Artist
Location: Santa Monica, California, United States
Type: Full-Time
Responsibilities:
- Communicates with Directors to bring directions to the environment concept team
- Manages and supports the environment concept team to make sure they get properly tasked and balances their workload, ensuring environment concept team’s wellbeing
- Manages individual concept artists, to keep their work on schedule
- Builds and modifies schedule, based on the team and studio needs
- Maintains a clear and consistent workflow under an established schedule
- Works closely with Leads, Principals and Directors to keep quality and style consistent across all environments
- Gives feedback to principals, seniors, and concept artists, to ensure environments are high quality and consistent
- Provides direction to concepts artists for aesthetic and technical considerations and help set the quality bar for environments
- Understands other department workflows and dependencies related to the environment concept team.
- Monitors the needs for Layout Design, Lighting, Background Art and Foreground Art to ensure clear environments in game
- Works closely with Background Art and Lighting to create environments that meet artistic requirements
- Works with principals to improve or solve workflow or pipeline issues and overall create strategies to achieve department goals.
- Had extensive knowledge of the latest game development tools, techniques, and workflows (including internal proprietary tools) and ability to share this with the team
- As an individual contributor, be able to make environment concepts in the highest quality across the industry
Qualifications & Skills:
- Great capacity of managing the environment concept team in terms of art and building achievable and realistic schedule, according to the needs of the studio
- Develop and maintain strong creative and collaborative partnerships across disciplines to help further develop the game environment and visual language
- Actively improve your skills and maintain an awareness of industry techniques, tools, evaluate competitive products, learning new software packages and traditional art methods
- At least 8 years of experience as a concept artist, working on at least one AAA title
- Great capacity to give the team feedback, and help setting the quality bar
- Very strong portfolio showing high quality concepts
- Expertise in concepting environments, high vision concept art, hard-surface props, key-frames and production callouts for games
- Keen eye and strong foundational art skills to include form, lighting, colors, and composition
- Knowledge of working with various 3D packages, used in concept work and in collaboration with other departments
