Technical Artist (Virtual Art Department)

Team: Virtual Art Department

Location: Los Angeles, United States

Commitment: Project

Workplace Type: onsite

Salary:

Responsibilities

Provide technical expertise, advice, and solutions to artists, animators, and riggers as required.
Collaborate across departments and with management to devise comprehensive solutions for quality enhancement and iteration efficiency.
Research and suggest appropriate tools and processes for projects.
Independently extract well-defined requirements from creative and artistic briefs.
Set performance and memory objectives and establish testing methods.
Understand quality / performance trade-offs and develop solutions that maximize both.
Manage multiple concurrent tasks from planning to development and delivery.
Adhere to and contribute to technical art best practices, processes, pipelines and tools.
Conduct code and content performance reviews as needed.
Thoroughly test all work in builds before submission. 
Identify potential risks associated with changes prior to submission to source control.
Understand roles in a scrum environment and assist in the definition of technical art tasks.
Attend daily standups, break down assigned tasks and provide estimates during sprint planning or other planning exercises
Proactively identify potential project challenges and propose feasible solutions.
Create and maintain comprehensive technical documentation as needed.

Required Qualifications

Expertise in industry-standard DCC tools (Maya, Max, Blender, Substance, Photoshop) to create 2D and 3D assets specifically for high-end realtime environments.
Proficiency in Unreal Engine, including Blueprinting and deep experience with lighting, rendering, and content integration for Virtual Production pipelines.
Strong understanding of realtime performance constraints, with the ability to identify and resolve bottlenecks within Unreal to maintain high frame rates on target devices.
Past experience working on photo-real PC projects and Virtual Production workflows, including color-managed pipelines (ACES/OCIO) and HDR rendering.
Strong proficiency in shader development (HLSL/GLSL) to optimize visual quality while adhering to strict realtime performance objectives.
Proactive in preempting and addressing performance limitations on target devices.
Proficient in using performance tools within the engine and on devices to identify performance bottlenecks.
Proficient working with version control for all work (Perforce, git or other), including work in progress.
Experience writing and editing clear technical documentation.
Strong proficiency in creating and optimising through the development of shaders, with a deep understanding of HLSL or GLSL.
Capable of planning, designing and implementing solutions to a broad range of technical art problems.
Able to communicate technical issues to non-technical team members.
A passion and willingness to explore new skills and techniques for themselves and any assigned mentees.