Virtuos is seeking a Lighting Director to participate in our AAA end-to-end level productions. Establishing lighting concepts and themes for an entire production including cinematics, narrative and environment lighting. A proven record of accomplishment in game and or cinematic lighting is a requirement, with experience ranging over multiple productions including environment and character lighting. A Lighting Director should demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of their discipline, both artistically and technically. Collaborating with Art and Technical Directors to achieve specific lighting goals for a production.

The ability to push an aesthetic vision and be able guide a lighting team to achieve the ambitions of a project, creating appropriately atmospheric and realistic scenes with tone, depth and color. A Lighting Director will establish the rules and an overarching continuity to a production ensuring that the lighting remains faithful across all aspects of the product with a complete understanding of how lighting affects game play, mood and the flow of a game.

Well versed in real-time engine lighting a Lighting Director has an excellent understanding of lighting, shading and PBR materials collaborating and advising content creators to achieve the highest visual results. An ability to work with technical artists to ensure optimized lighting scenes are performant for baked or real-time lighting. Knowledge and use of post processing effects is an expectation including but not limited to bloom, ambient occlusion and color correction.

Excellent communication is necessary to ensure working collaboratively with various disciplines including concept, character, environment and visual effects runs smoothly. A reasonable level of English is preferred due to the nature of our industry and the variety of Virtuos partner collaborations.

Key Responsibilities

Develop lighting visual language for projects, establishing rules and guidelines for production
Establish lighting benchmarks, and working with a team, maintain established quality
Light levels and characters in real time according to predefined quality standards, artistic styles
Evaluate and critique lighting with a keen eye for details, and mitigating and correcting errors
Accept and give feedback, flexible to ever changing techniques and adoption of new ideas
Optimize lighting for performance and requirements
Finalize lighting imagery with post processing techniques available
Maintain relevancy by keeping up to date with latest technology and techniques.
Mentor lighting artists and establish best practices within the department
Facilitate requests or information needs regarding any aspect of the environment/character lighting
Mentor lighting artists, encouraging artistic evolution within the studio
Comprehend all aspects of CG lighting including but not limited to light maps, performance, probes, raytracing, HDR, color grading, baked and dynamic lighting
Problem solve regarding the lighting pipeline and techniques
Generate documentation for lighting pipelines and style guides
Originality and resourcefulness when setting out solutions;

Role Requirements

6+ years of game industry or related experience
3+ published titles demonstrating lighting capabilities
Experience with photorealistic lighting for real-time engines (Unreal4, Unity, Lumberyard, other)
Extensive knowledge of lighting, shading, PBR, color and image composition
Knowledge of other video game production
Excellent artistic knowledge of lighting techniques, real-time and pre-rendering.
Good communication, organizational, time management, and interpersonal skills
Mastery of lighting fundamentals, how lighting effects mood, gameplay, and frame rate in real-time environments
Proficiency in digital authoring tools, such as Maya, 3DSMax, Blender, Perforce