Obsidian Entertainment is looking for an experienced, proficient, communicative, and collaborative Lead Technical Artist to assist our growing team of RPG developers with world building, tools, pipeline, and performance on an unannounced project. This position requires a solid understanding of the current concerns, performance monitoring tools and pipelines for open world development in Unreal 4 on PCs and Consoles. The Lead Technical Artist will lead and manage other Technical Artists and collaborate with the Art Director, Technical Director, Game Director, and production artists.
Responsibilities
- Lead, mentor, and manage other technical artists
- Provide transparency and build relationships with stakeholders across disciplines and teams
- Negotiate technical art priorities to meet project needs
- Proactively seek out inefficiencies and problems in art and world building pipelines; identify and drive solutions
- Improve and enhance tools/processes for effective streaming and optimization throughout the project cycle
- Support programmers and designers in researching and developing new game features
- Validate art content against technical and performance guidelines prior to in-game integration
- Establish processes and best practices to ensure assets are setup, exported, and integrated into the game properly
- Collaborate with artists and designers to ensure assets are organized
- Establish, foster, and enforce asset-handling best practices
- Establish systems and processes that enable many developers to collaborate efficiently on large content (e.g., world areas)
- Optimization ownership: hardware instancing, LOD creation and manipulation, distance culling, HLOD creation, etc.
Requirements
- A good understanding of modern games development with a keen artistic eye
- Functional knowledge of efficient and performant open world creation
- 4+ years of open world development in the game industry with 2 shipped titles as a Technical or Senior Technical Artist
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to effectively balance the needs of game design, art, and programming
Pluses
- Experience developing with Unreal Engine 4
- Experience using 3ds Max, Maya, or Houdini
- Experience with other game engines, like Frostbite, Unity, etc.
- Be able to work comfortably with common scripting languages (MAXScript, MEL script, Python, etc.)
Portfolio Requirements
- A web portfolio that demonstrates visual quality with performance in game environments
- Samples, demonstrations or documentation of tools pipelines developed to overcome past challenges
Obsidian Entertainment is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
Please, no phone calls or drop-ins. We only accept electronic applications.
