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VFX Artist

Senior VFX Artist

Job Summary

Maxis is looking for a talented Senior VFX Artist who would who would report to our Principal Art Director. We are gearing up for our next big production and we need some passionate teammates to collaborate with to bring our new project to life. If you are passionate about VFX pipelines, bringing the latest trends in technology to bear against your craft, and collaborating with others to develop excellent user experiences for new IP … come join our team.

Responsibilities

• Work with Art Direction, Technical Partners, and Concept to develop the project's VFX language.
• Create the highest quality real-time visual effects, both in appearance and performance, while following the project's aesthetic vision.
• Collaborate closely with Art, Design, & Animation teams to create beautiful effects that offer creative solutions to design challenges, add life to the game world, and create wow moments for the users.
• Collaborate with development partners to map out VFX development from pre-production to production including factors such as, team and technology ramp up.
• Acknowledge our small startup team format and provide look dev and feature prototyping, not restricted to VFX.
• Work with Technical Art Directors, Engineers, and studio VFX Artists to develop industry leading VFX pipelines, based in visual scripting environments such as Unreal Engine’s Niagara & Blueprints or Unity VFX Graph, and supporting DCC apps [Houdini, Maya, FumeFX, Nuke, Substance Designer, etc.] .
• Develop workflows supporting a large ecosystem of multi-platform real-time effects assets.
• Collaborate with Technical & VFX Art partners across EA to develop and share pipelines and best practices.
• Contribute original ideas on all aspects of game development.
• Firefight production issues, resolve roadblocks, and provide solutions to technical challenges.
• Keep up with the latest trends and technical tools for developing effects content and inspire others thru knowledge sharing.

Qualifications and Skills

• 5 years production experience using game engines to create real-time VFX with a supporting body of work.
• Served as a Senior or Lead VFX Artist on a published AAA title and have shipping experience on multiple game titles.
• Experience creating advanced real-time visual effects out of a variety of building blocks including particles, static textures, animated textures, lights, post processing, materials, meshes and shaders.
• Experience producing effects such as smoke, fire, clouds, water, steam, and explosions.
• Excellent composition/framing skills and sense of scale, timing, detail, form, texture and color.
• Experience developing visual language across an ecosystem of effects.
• Author stylized interpretations of real-world visual effects following our game’s art direction.
• Technically deconstruct visual effects from other game and film references.
• Unreal Engine Proficiency with Cascade or Niagara, and visual scripting through node-based systems.
• Proficiency with visual scripting and node-based systems such as UE4 Cascade/Niagara & Blueprints or Unity VFX Graph.
• Create assets within the confines of real-time engine memory and performance constraints, and the ability to optimize effects to achieve the highest visual quality.
• Experience with in engine lighting, post effects, and Physically Based shading models.
• Create advanced materials and effects for control in level through parameters.
• Experience with run-time dynamic systems for physics-based animation, impact interactions, destruction, water, cloth & hair sim, etc.
• Excellent working knowledge of Maya, general understanding of animation/modeling/texturing and instancing pipelines.
• Expert experience creating 3D assets and materials in other packages as needed to support effects [Houdini, Nuke, Substance Designer, Photoshop, After Effects, etc.].
• Background in the creation, naming and storage of the effects assets.
• Comfortable working as a group and operate autonomously with minimal feedback and the ability to self-critique.
• Commitment to personal and peer development, sharing best practices, staying current with the state-of-the-art in visual effects.

Bonus Qualifications

• Development experience on current-gen console hardware (XB1/PS4/).
• Experience using PIX, GPAD, or other GPU profiling tools.
• Experience with iOS/Android.
• Experience and comfort with one or more scripting/programming languages [Python, C#, C++].
• The ability to read and write shader source code using HLSL or GLSL.
• Background in photography, painting, concept art, or animation.
• Modeling, sculpting and animation technique experience.
• Experience with Houdini, Maya Bifrost, & FumeFX.