Videogame - Realtime Senior VFX Artist

About One Man Studio

We partner with major AAA teams to ship real-time content. Senior, hands-on, fully remote.

The Role

Work embedded with the development team to conceive, prototype, and ship stylised-realism VFX for characters and environments. You’ll own lookdev, integration, and performance in our proprietary engine , collaborating tightly with Animation, Design, Tech Art, Environment/Lighting, and Audio to keep effects readable, on-style, and within budget.

What You’ll Do

• Concept to Ship: Explore references, sketch/test looks, build prototypes, and take effects through production to final.

• Author effects: Create particle systems/emitters, shader/material graphs, flipbooks, mesh-based FX, decals, and simple UI cues.

• Readability & style: Nail timing, silhouettes, value/color, and screen economy so FX land under gameplay camera and lighting—expressive yet grounded.

• Integration: Drive hooks via engine scripting or animation/gameplay events; expose tunables so designers and animators can iterate safely.

• Performance: Profile with engine tools/frame captures; manage bounds, LODs, culling, update rates, and quality tiers to hit budgets.

• Libraries & templates: Maintain textures/flipbooks/curves and reusable system templates; partner with Tech Art on validators and small utilities.

• Cross-discipline cohesion: Sync with Lighting on exposure/grade, with Design on telegraphy, and with Audio on beats/sync.

• Documentation: Provide succinct breakdowns and parameters so other pods can reuse and extend systems.

Requirements

• 5+ years creating real-time VFX for games; 1+ shipped AA/AAA title (or equivalent live product).

• Strong game-engine VFX background: modern particle tools, material/shader graphing, scripting/visual scripting, and timeline/cinematic tools; solid GPU/CPU trade-off intuition.

• Authoring chops: flipbook creation (Substance/Houdini/Photoshop), ribbons/trails, mesh/lighting interactions, decals.

• Proven eye for timing, shape language, value/color , and gameplay readability in a stylised-realism aesthetic.

• Performance-minded under production lighting; comfortable profiling and optimizing.

• Clear communicator; reliable in a remote, multi-time-zone team.

Nice to Have

• Houdini for VFX meshes/flipbooks and utility tools.

• Fluid/volumetric lookdev (smoke/fire) and stylised FX techniques.

• Basic C++/Python for tooling; custom data bindings/interfaces to drive FX.

Portfolio

Show final, in-engine VFX with succinct breakdowns : particle graphs, shader snippets, flipbook sources, perf notes (overdraw/shader cost/calls), and gameplay captures under production lighting. If we can’t see process and results, we can’t assess.

What Success Looks Like

• Effects are clear, on-style, and on budget —no late surprises.

• Systems and templates are reusable , speeding up other pods.

• Tight integration with Design/Animation results in fewer iteration loops and faster approvals.