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Senior Character Artist

Senior Character Artist | Maxis | Redwood Shores

Job Summary

Maxis is looking for a Senior Character Artist to help establish the look and pipeline of our characters for a new, unannounced project. If you are a visionary character artist who is adept at stylization, artistic interpretation and a deep experience in character pipelines, bringing the latest trends in technology to bear against your craft, and mentoring others to develop excellent experiences for new and existing IP … come join our team.

The Role

You work closely with the Art Director and Technical Leads to define visual standards and technical specifications of characters for the project.

You also actively participate in RnD of the asset creation methods and pipelines designed to add new design-driven features unique for the project.

In addition to creating high quality character models and materials, you guide junior members of the team and external partners to deliver work that meets the project standards. You proactively seek opportunities to elevate the game, enjoy finding emerging technologies that improve the pipeline, embrace constructive feedback, and thrive in a highly collaborative environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with the Art Director and technical partners to define and refine the look and feel of characters for the project.
• Work with Technical Art, Engineering and other artists to develop the character creation and integration pipeline.
• Research emerging modeling techniques and convey them to the Technical Art team.
• Create high quality character models and materials/shaders including in-game and high-resolution assets.
• Update style and technical documents for the character art team.
• Collaborate with Technical Artists to create and improve tools and workflows.
• Actively participate in milestone planning and reviews.
• Work within deadlines and display strong time management skills.
• Provide mentorship for junior team members.
• Review work from external partners and provide feedback.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of production experience as a character artist.
• Have served as a Senior or Lead Character Artist on a published title and have shipping experience on multiple game titles.
• Mastery in industry standard software like Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter/Designer and Photoshop .
• Strong understanding of scale, proportion, surface properties, and human anatomy.
• Demonstrated ability in character stylization
• Knowledge of character setup and rigging.
• Demonstrate understanding of the key topology principles for human body and face, animals, cloth, hair, props.
• Understanding of current gen video game tech methods and their implications for the character creation pipeline, for example: PBR, dynamics, displacement, parallax, SSS, shader animation.
• Experience collaborating with designers, animators, riggers, engineers to develop new solution/tool/tech/pipeline.
• Experience working with video game engines and implementing 3D work into the pipeline.
• Ability to create shaders/materials using painting and node-based techniques (e.g. Substance Painter and Designer)
• Knowledge of high-poly to low-poly surface baking
• Strong written and oral communication skills
• Passion for making and playing games

Bonus Qualifications

• Cloth simulation.
• Knowledge of scripting (Python, Max Script, Maya mel)
• Experience working with remote teams (outsourcing).

Materials required for Application

• Portfolio and/or Reel (via website, blog, or online gallery) demonstrating examples of stylized characters and several examples of the topology
• Resume/CV