Lighting Artist / Technical Director - ILM San Francisco (Project Hire)

About the role

The Lighting Artist / Technical Director is responsible for designing lighting setups for environments, characters, and interactive game assets. They collaborate with Art Directors, Lighting Leads, and Concept Artists to ensure the aesthetic and technical quality of the work.

Responsibilities

• Work with Art Directors, Lighting Leads, and Concept Artists to design lighting setups for environments, characters, and interactive game assets.
• Have a deep understanding of lightmap baking, dynamic lighting tools, image based specular lighting, indirect light probes, post-process volumes, and real-time rendering.
• Work with environment, character, and VFX artists to achieve the desired targets for aesthetics and performance through material shaders and geometry work.
• Partner with level designers to animate dynamic lighting or transitions using level blueprint or sequencer.
• Actively participate in improving workflows, optimizations, and best practices.
• Identify, triage, and fix bugs as required, working with engineering and relevant departments.
• Take the final project to a high degree of polish and optimization.

Requirements

• 5+ years experience as a Lighting TD/Artist in AAA game development or animation/vfx/film.
• Strong aesthetic sense for lighting and color theory.
• Strong technical knowledge of current real-time lighting tool sets including atmospheric effects, post processing, color grading, and HDR IBL workflows.
• Able to effectively take direction and know what looks good and why.
• Experience with Unreal/Unity or equivalent game engine including dynamic and baked lighting workflows, physically-based rendering, and basic level blueprint scripting.
• Shaders: in-depth knowledge of real-time shader implementations, limitations of shaders in VR, strong knowledge of PBR pipelines, and subsurface shaders.
• Materials: experienced in the development, authoring & organization of efficient materials via the UE4 material editor.
• Fluency in working in Windows, JIRA, Perforce or equivalent OS, workload and data management tools.
• Excellent communication, organization, and problem-solving skills and self-motivated.

Qualifications

• Bonus points for:
• - Strong traditional art, photography or film studies background.
• - Proficient with profiling tools to examine & diagnose performance issues related to lighting.
• - Experience with one or more of the following: Maya, Unity, Substance Designer / Painter, Zbrush or Mudbox, Houdini, Mari, 3D StudioMax, Photoshop, Nuke.
• - Interest and capacity to work with proprietary toolsets.

Skills

• Proficiency in real-time lighting tool sets.
• Understanding of PBR pipelines and subsurface shaders.
• Experience with UE4 material editor.
• Ability to work with proprietary toolsets.

Benefits

Not specified.

Pay

$103,812 to $132,930 per year.

Schedule

Not specified.