Senior Lighting Artist / Technical Director - Expression of Interest - ILM San Francisco

Position Summary

ILM’s Interactive team advances the studio’s legacy of innovation by developing original immersive experiences across virtual reality, augmented reality and location-based platforms. Known for blending best-in-class visuals, sound and narrative, the team has delivered award-winning projects such as What If…? – An Immersive Story, Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series and the Oscar-winning CARNE y ARENA. Our work continues to push the boundaries of immersive entertainment and redefine how audiences engage with story.

What You’ll Do

• Work with Art Directors, VFX Supervisors, Other Department Leads to define and direct Lighting tools and setups/rigs for environments, characters and interactive game assets
• Work with Render Engineers to define and test the needed lighting toolset for the given project
• Support the development of the project pipeline to the delivery platform which may include lightbaking and pre-rendered elements
• Deep knowledge of lightmap baking, dynamic lighting tools, image based specular lighting, indirect light probes, post-process volumes and real-time rendering and raytracing
• Partner with environment, character and VFX artists in the lighting design to achieve the desired targets for aesthetics and performance through material shader and geometry work
• Actively participate in improving workflows, optimizations and best practices
• Identify, triage, and fix bugs as required working with engineering and relevant departments
• Take final project to a high degree of polish and optimization

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years experience as a lighting TD/artist - in 3D game development or animation/vfx film studio
• Strong aesthetic sense for lighting and color theory
• Strong technical understanding of current real time lighting tool sets including atmospheric effects, post processing, color grading and HDR IBL workflows
• Team player who can take direction and know what looks good and why
• Experience with Unreal/Unity or equivalent real time platform: dynamic and baked lighting workflows: physically-based rendering and basic level blueprint scripting
• Shaders: in-depth knowledge of real-time shader implementations, PBR pipelines, subsurface shaders, and limitations of shaders in VR
• 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

Bonus Points

• Strong traditional art, photography or film studies background
• Passion for playing and making games, experience or interest in VR and AR
• VFX production / pipeline experience
• Proficient with profiling tools in the examination & diagnosis of 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

Join ILM

The hiring range for this position in San Francisco is $134,300 to $171,800 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.