Studio: Creative Assembly
Job Opening: Lead VFX Artist
Location: Horsham, West Sussex, England, UK
Type: Full-Time
Responsibilities:
- Work with Art Directors across different projects to define the art style for VFX
- Create world class VFX content for previsualisation, benchmarks, and visual development
- Ensure the VFX team are empowered to create rich and varied effects and reach benchmark quality, with strong leadership and regular feedback
- Lead the VFX and lighting artists, and develop the team with training, mentorship and career development
- Collaborate on hiring plan, handle recruitment and onboarding of new hires
- Work with the production team to plan the VFX content and deliver VFX work on schedule and to the highest standards
- Maintain team health and wellbeing, whilst motivating the team to be productive and proactive
- Set art standards in conjunction with the technical teams to ensure the VFX are performant and consistent across all projects
- Research emerging visual effects technology, plan roadmap of technical improvements to keep competitive with industry trends
- Work closely with design, animation, and other teams to ensure VFX is fully integrated in the game experience
- Work with graphics, tools and other teams to build and maintain an efficient VFX and lighting pipeline
- Collaborate across the franchise to seek out opportunities to enrich the game further with VFX of various types and lighting effects.
Qualifications & Skills:
- Extensive experience of working in game development. At least 3 shipped titles
- Extensive experience of real-time VFX authoring tools
- Expert knowledge of one or more 3d packages
- Strong knowledge of Photoshop, Substance, and other 2d editing or texturing software
- Ability to create animated textures, simulations, and associated related 2d content
- Ability to create meshes, shaders and materials, and associated content for mesh based VFX
- Basic animation understanding and skills to implement this in VFX for timing
- Experience in lighting and image processing
- Understanding of colour theory, visual design, and composition
- Proactive, results-oriented, practical approach, with excellent time management skills
- Understanding of VFX performance and experience planning and optimising for various platforms
- Excellent interpersonal and leadership skill
- Excellent proactive problem-solving skills
- Strong awareness of industry technology trends
- Love of games!
Desirable:
- Experience of leading a team
- Experience on AAA titles
- Unreal/Unity or other commercial engine experience
- Experience developing FX for strategy games
- Technical understanding of rendering, lighting and physics
- Experience profiling and optimising games
- Knowledge of Houdini, Embergen, Pflow, thinking particles, tyflow, fumefx, phoenixfd or any offline rendering FX related tools or workflows
- Knowledge of destruction simulations
- Skills in HLSL or other shader languages.
