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Technical Artist - Metalhead Studio (Victoria, BC)

EA SPORTS is one of the leading sports entertainment brands in the world, with top-selling videogame franchises, award-winning interactive technology, fan programs, and cross-platform digital experiences. EA SPORTS creates connected experiences that ignite the emotion of sport through industry-leading sports video games, including Madden NFL football, FIFA soccer, NHL® hockey, NBA LIVE basketball, and EA SPORTS UFC.

The team at Metalhead comes from diverse backgrounds, unified by a passion to make original games. We've supported and inspired each other through the development and evolution of the Super Mega Baseball series and have built a fierce fanbase in the process. And we get to do it all from downtown Victoria. We're growing the studio and hope you'll consider joining us.

As we move forward into the world of popular sports titles, we want to make sure that we continue to push the boundaries of what we can achieve visually. This means always improving our character building and rendering techniques. It means being responsive to industry changes in lighting, animation, art production and our pipeline. We are looking to expand our dev team with someone who can lead an area of development and make it presentation-worthy, build processes that can let others achieve our goals or even make some final assets. How do we make believable grass? What can we do to make water look better? What is the best way to render hair?

What you'll do:

• Use content authoring tools and shader code to create visual effects.
• Research and implement workflows that let artists efficiently create content following the Art Director's vision, and with the assistance of the development team implement the required run time technology to achieve the desired effects in real time.
• Prototype (or final) special effects, post processing effects, and rendering effects.
• Stay up-to-date on industry techniques and practices on visual effects and content automation tools.
• Work with the Art Director to formulate plans to bring their vision into a real time rendered scene.
• Script and automate repetitive tasks in content creation pipelines.
• Identify error prone manual processes and automate them, or produce error checking code to help artists build valid content.
• Make art that complements the processes, either as final assets or as representations of assets that can be finalized by other artists.

Qualities we're looking for:

• Has successfully shipped AA+ titles in the past.
• You will have experience writing shader code using HLSL, or a shader graph tool.
• You will have experience automating content tools with script such as MaxScript, Mel or Python.
• You understand the relationship between geometry, materials and shader math to achieve desired visual effects.
• 3+ years of experience with video game content pipelines, their complexities and limitations.
• You will have experience with the trade off between visual quality and performance implications across a range of devices.
• You have an appreciation of good art and an interest in art techniques.
• You enjoy a challenge and being able to work within limitations.
• Experience using C++ and C# are preferred.

Regardless of your specialization, a few things we're always looking for:

• You love to consume art as much as you love to make it and you continually seek to hone your craft.
• You have the ability to excel in a team environment. You look for help when you're stuck and you want to help your teammates when they need it.
• Experience managing your time. You know when to go deeper on a task versus recognizing that it's time to get 'er done and move on to the next thing. Quality is important, but so is speed!
• A willingness to branch into areas outside your core expertise. It's just a fact of life in a small studio as we adapt to the changing demands at each stage of a project.
• Drive to execute. Projects you've worked on in the past (personal or professional) got finished, and got finished properly… and it had a lot to do with you.
• A sense of humor. At least enough that you can tolerate our dumb jokes.

Please ensure that you include your portfolio with your application. Cover letters are also encouraged!