Senior 3D Character Artist

THIS IS A ON-SITE (NON-REMOTE) POSITION

1518 is a branding of PTW, a global leading gaming services company that specializes in creating exceptional AA/AAA games for gaming developers worldwide. Our commitment to innovation and dedication to delivering top-tier gaming experiences have made us a prominent player in the industry. As a Senior 3D Character Artist at 1518, you will have the opportunity to contribute your creativity and skills to bring our game characters to life in exciting and immersive ways.

Position: Senior 3D Character Artist

Job Overview: As a Senior 3D Character Artist at PTW Gaming Services, you will be at the forefront of character art development, leading our talented team to create high-quality, realistic or stylized 3D characters that embody intricate details and excellent topology. Your extensive experience and artistic expertise will be instrumental in providing artistic direction, offering valuable feedback, and mentoring team members to ensure the delivery of outstanding character assets. Collaboration with other departments to meet technical and animation requirements will be crucial in this role. This is a remarkable opportunity to join our on-site team and take the lead in shaping the visual identity of our globally recognized AA/AAA games.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and inspire the character art team, providing artistic direction, feedback, and mentorship to elevate their skills and achieve excellence in character creation.
• Create high-quality and visually striking 3D characters, whether realistic or stylized, ensuring intricate details and impeccable topology.
• Collaborate closely with other departments, including animation and technical teams, to ensure characters meet technical and animation requirements for seamless integration into the game.
• Utilize your expertise in integrating final delivery assets into game engines like Unity and/or Unreal, ensuring flawless character integration.
• Leverage your experience in creating shaders for characters and assets to enhance visual appeal and achieve the desired artistic style.
• Stay updated with industry trends, techniques, and technologies related to character art, and apply this knowledge to improve workflows and maintain the highest quality standards.

Requirements

Qualifications

• BA in Art Media, graphic design or equivalent relevant experience (bachelor's in fine arts, computer animation, illustration, digital arts, media arts or master's of fine arts in animation or visual effects for example).
• Previous AAA/Indie/PC games, mobile games and NFT projects or at minimum a passion for games and knowledge of the gaming industry.
• Good understanding of creative briefs, able to consider elements such as context, timescales and creative constraints when solving tasks.
• A keen eye for spinning narrative and life into a character, props and special effects.
• Excellent time management skills, able to meet deadlines and multitask.
• Excellent creative thinking skills, able to solve creative problems through innovative solutions, balancing flow, function and aesthetics.
• Solid understanding of both realistic and cartoon human/creature poses and keyframe animations.
• Proficient skills at creating facial expressions and animations in conjunction with blendshapes or similar.
• The ability to provide multiple creative options, then iterate upon them as projects progress.
• Knowledge of computer 2D/3D animation techniques, motion design and camera movement principles. Able to animate characters, objects and special effects.
• Skilled at working within Maya and Motion Capture data to create the animations.
• Experienced with animation mockups, able to plan and generate asset libraries to help smooth the pipeline.
• Strong collaborative attitude. A receptive individual who's open to take feedback and working together with team-mates on streamlining and improving the animation pipelines/processes and deliverables.
• Experienced with working across departments to provide the most optimized format for the best in-game performance.
• High level of proficiency in 2D/3D editing and software tools like Maya, After Effects CC, Premier Pro CC, Adobe Flash, Animate CC environment, Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC to be able to deliver any kind of good quality 2D/3D assets.
• Supportive attitude, eager to guide other animators in the team and take ownership.
• Fluency in written and spoken English.

Nice to have

• A solid background in academic drawing, sketching and/or illustration is a major asset.
• Ability to draw in a variety of styles and genres with knowledge of lighting, perspective, material finishes and special effects, and a cinematic eye for lighting and shading.
• Big plus: proficiency with Unity (or another game engine), with the ability to import, export and set up the animation state machine with devs and troubleshoot issues.
• Experience with 3D tools, texturing in both Low/High poly and texture painting skills.
• Knowledge of animation, Illustrator, Flash, Unity engine, particle effects creation programs (e.g. combustion, particle illusion, fork) and motion graphics programs (eg After Effects).
• Good understanding of the 2D/3D rigging process and different technical software.

Benefits

• Competitive remuneration.
• Dynamic and entrepreneurial global multicultural casual, fun environment.
• You get to work with the latest technologies
• You will be working for one of the worlds leading providers of specialist services to the games industry.

Who we are

PTW is a video games services company which supports video game developers and publishers through outsourced production services. We started 25 years ago and since then, have grown exponentially year-on-year to where we are today. Our history is in gaming, and we are gamers at heart. In our time within the games industry, we have worked on over 1500 titles across all genres and all platforms, including 8 out of the past 10 Game-Of-The-Year-winning titles.

We have grown rapidly over the past few years and now have 35 sites spanning the globe. The PTW umbrella of companies includes 1518, SIDE and Orange Rock. SIDE works at the cutting edge of interactive media as a provider of audio services for the global entertainment market. Orange Rock is our in-house game and product development studio. 1518 is our award- winning global Art studio service.

Welcome to 1518