Senior Technical Artist - ILM San Francisco (Project Hire)

Job Summary:

ILM’s Interactive team advances the studio’s legacy of innovation by developing original immersive experiences across virtual reality, augmented reality and location-based platforms. Known for blending best-in-class visuals, sound and narrative, the team has delivered award-winning projects such as What If…? – An Immersive Story, Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series and the Oscar-winning CARNE y ARENA. Our work continues to push the boundaries of immersive entertainment and redefine how audiences engage with story. 

We are seeking a Senior Technical Artist who reflects the innovative spirit, creative talent, production excellence, and passion for great storytelling that defines ILM.

The Senior Technical Artist is instrumental in creating, building, and delivering key content and workflows contributing with artists, designers, and engineers to achieve both artistic and optimization goals in the creation of next-generation immersive experiences. This role acts as a key liaison between the content and engineering teams and facilitates problem solving, strategies, and implementations between departments. 

We are looking for a creative technologist who is passionate about bringing the latest technical trends in real-time development to their craft, and who reflects the innovative spirit and immersive storytelling that defines ILM Immersive.

What You’ll Do

• Conceive, prototype, implement technically advanced visuals and procedural systems.

• Contribute to look development of the highest-caliber real-time art by creating shaders, lighting and particle effects, and partnering with character and environment artists on asset lookdev.

• Partner with the art and engineering teams to understand, define and manage project technical requirements and project asset production.

• Assist artists and designers via tool development, and in concept testing of new ideas, and building of rapid prototypes.

• Look/dev passes of environmental supporting elements, atmospherics, lighting, post-processes and other VFX for scene / level. Actively participate in optimizations, identify, triage, and fix bugs as required.

• Explore and implement new tools and techniques to continuously push the visual bar to the leading edge using scripting (Blueprints, Python) and rapid prototypes.

• Mentor and collaborate with other Technical Artists to improve studio tools and pipelines. 

• Proactively identify problems, propose solutions, and seek out buy-in from the team regarding implementation strategy. 

• Provide hands-on support to the development team for asset performance profiling and optimization. Identify, triage, and fix bugs as required.

• Standardize and improve best practices for production of assets, materials, shaders, LODs, asset streaming, collisions, and interactions.

• Innovate discipline workflows and keep up to date on new tools/applications/trends in the industry.
  

What You’ll Need

• 5+ years experience in games, film, television, AR/VR or related fields.

• Experience with programming/scripting languages such as Python, C++, C#, Java, VEX, or MEL and a proficiency with linear algebra.

• Strong 3D art skills with experience and deep understanding of optimizing and constructing modeling, texturing, uv mapping, animation, shading, lighting and particle effects for real-time workflows.

• Proficient in Maya, Houdini, Blender, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and/or Photoshop.

• Unreal Engine: extensive experience working with UE workflows: Blueprints, material networks, real-time lighting and simulations, post processing.

• Shaders: in-depth knowledge of real-time shader implementations, limitations of shaders in VR, strong knowledge of PBR pipelines and subsurface shaders.

• Materials: extensive experience in the development, authoring & organization of efficient node-based materials, hierarchies, material functions, and custom shaders via the UE4 material editor.

• Familiarity with profiling tools in the examination & diagnosis of performance issues.

• Team-player mindset: open & receptive to ideas, constructive feedback, direction and changes.

• Ability to work independently and efficiently under tight deadlines. Works well with direction, but also is self-motivated and will seek out or devise solutions to unexpected challenges.

Desired skills and experience:

• Passion for playing and making games, experience or interest in VR and AR.

• Visual Effects production / pipeline experience.

• Interest and capacity to work with proprietary toolsets.

* A portfolio / reel submission - including a detailed breakdown of your work in each section - is required with all applications

JoinILM

The hiring range for this position in San Francisco is $134,300 to $171,800 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.