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Senior Character Artist

We are seeking a Senior Character Artist with a passion for bringing highly realistic characters to life to tell evocative stories. Working in a collaborative team environment with the character, rigging, facial and engineering teams to deliver stunning characters, using the best scanning and hand-crafted pipelines. You will collaborate on the capture, creation, and final execution of all aspects of the characters for gameplay and cinematic AAA content. With your help we will push the industry to new heights of realism, gameplay, and storytelling.

Responsibilities:

• Creating iconic, realistic game characters.
• Ensuring that our character art embodies the project story, gameplay, and art pillars.
• Work on and refine all static and dynamic material assets for the character including but not limited to asset materials and textures, wrinkle maps, capillary dilation maps, damage maps and many others.
• Work together with the rest of the character department to create character pipelines and efficient workflows to speed up the character creation process.
• Collaborate with the Lead Character Artist and production to plan, flag blocker and deliver on your schedules, quality goals.
• Work at the highest level, technically and aesthetically while balancing scope, deadlines, and performance considerations.
• Work with tech art and engineering to refine and debug specific character pipelines such as acquisition, asset creation, final in-game lighting and rendering pipelines.
• Proactively anticipate, troubleshoot and solve production issues, asset and material optimizations, and game bugs.

Requirements & Skills:

• Proven portfolio demonstrating the ability to build realistic and iconic characters of the highest quality .
• Strong understanding of, and ability to analyze clothing construction, fabric properties and scanned assets.
• 5+ years of professional character modeling experience in games or film.
• Excellent eye for human/animal anatomy and realistic organic deformation.
• Knowledge, experience and interest in using scanned and simulated assets in the creation of characters.
• Extensive experience with PBR material pipelines and use of PBR texturing tools such as Substance Painter.
• Advanced user of ZBrush.
• Maya expertise in areas of modeling, UVing and texturing.
• Deep knowledge of character pipelines and tech.
• Experience with pipeline creation for high end games.
• Autonomous worker that is not afraid to explore new toolsets, pipelines and broaden their professional skillset overall.
• (Bonus) Shipped a AAA game as a character artist.
• (Bonus) Experience working at a startup studio.
• (Bonus) Experience with technical art or shader creation.
• (Bonus) Experience shipping a game in UE4 or experience working in UE5.
• (Bonus) Fine art or traditional sculpting background or education.
• (Bonus) Substance Designer experience.
• (Bonus) Experience rigging/weighting characters for games or film.

Qualities:

• Hardworking collaborator seeking to advance art and tech through intra-departmental and multi-discipline partnerships.
• Effective team player invested in personal growth and the growth of the character team through sharing, inspiration, inclusivity, and mutual respect.
• Self-motivated to achieve excellence in design, process, and execution.
• Strong interpersonal skills with a dedication to working in a diverse, hardworking, and empathetic team.
• Skilled and efficient communicator adapt at providing and receiving constructive feedback & direction.

TNM considers a number of factors when determining each role's base pay range, including industry benchmarks, location, experience, and other job specific skills. In addition to base pay, this role may be eligible for other incentive compensation including equity and profit share. The estimated base pay range for this role is U.S. only and not applicable for locations outside of the U.S.
TNM offers competitive and comprehensive benefits that include medical, dental, vision, 401(k) match, unlimited PTO, supplemental life and disability, and more. Eligibility to participate in these benefits may vary for part-time or temporary employees.
The estimated base pay range for this role is: $100,000 - $145,000