Environment Artist (Terrain)
24 days ago
For more than twenty years, Criterion Games has entertained millions of players around the world with award-winning titles. With a proud history working on beloved franchises including Battlefield, Star Wars Battlefront and Need for Speed.
We’re a team renowned for our expertise and passion for delivering phenomenal game feel, AAA audio-visual quality, technical innovation and for pushing boundaries to create immersive narratives. We’re regularly recognised as one of the best places to work in the UK, and we believe that healthy, diverse and engaged teams make great games, so we place enormous value on collaboration, fresh ideas, and unique perspectives.
We are looking to grow our internal team focussing on strong specific skills and therefor looking for an experienced Terrain Artist, who will have the opportunity to build on the vast knowledge of the amazing Dice team, offering the player an explosive, visceral, and authentic experience. You will report to the Environment Director. What you'll do:
- Using direction from your lead, build terrain materials and assets that adhere to environment theming & tone, drawing from reference and delivering visually stunning, authentic, player first experiences throughout our worlds.
- You will provide high quality art content that contributes to many different aspects of world terrain from setup, textures, asset integration and dressing, setting the bar for content made by our external partners and positively influencing more junior members of our immediate team.
- Building on the high standard established by Dice, work with the Environment Director and Technical Art team to explore and test methods for creating terrain owned by you. Defining what looks great by creating example dioramas using assets (like verge pieces), leveraging procedural systems within Frostbite, developing new workflows, setting standards and ensuring we are in scope for production.
- Develop our methods for gathering or creating accurate heightmap and blendmap data.
- Work with the Technical Art team to develop improved shaders that enhance quality and allow for improved features such as dust, wetness and snow.
- Work with both the Technical Art team and Engineering teams to help establish performance and memory budgets to set achievable targets for terrain quality and complexity, ensuring other artists working on terrain have a workflow that is great to use.
- Work with Foliage Artists to help create great terrain scatter components, ensuring they are setup correctly on the terrain and that they are integrated seamlessly with the textures.
- Develop and improve our photogrammetry workflows.
- Author spline data to provide enhanced road surface visuals and track indentation.
- Providing documentation to instruct others and reviewing the work done by others once they have worked on terrain.
What we would love you to bring:
- Experience as a senior member of the team that has made world terrain previously in video games on console.
- Experience using a range of game world production content tools, such as Unreal Engine, Frostbite, Maya, 3DS Max and Substance.
- A perspective on current trends and workflows that will help push terrain development methods to the next level.
- A keenness to help develop and use new tools and workflows related to terrain creation.
- An appreciation of the Arts, Animation, Visual Language and a knowledge of games that deliver great experiences supported by high quality terrain.
- A passion and an appreciation, interest or knowledge of strata, rock formations, rock types and geology and a drive to teach others in this field.
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