Character Technical Artist - Contract

Playground Games is looking for a Character Technical Artist to join our Fable team to support our character artists to create diverse, high quality characters for our game.

As a Character Technical Artist, you will collaborate across multiple disciplines acting as a bridge between art and engineering teams. You will be responsible for finding and delivering improvements in quality, workflow and performance for characters in the game.

We are considering a range of experience levels for this position (for which appropriate adjustments to responsibilities will be made).

What you'll do

Our Character Technical Artists provide a wide range of support to the character team:

• Take ownership of the authoring and export tools for character artists (supported by the Technical Animation team who are responsible for rigging/skinning of characters)
• Work closely with the rendering team to create character shaders that push visual quality to the forefront of the industry
• Support the team's vision to create an inclusive roster of diverse characters
• Take responsibility for the performance of characters in our game by creating tools and processes to ensure the best possible balance between quality and cost
• Identify bottlenecks and promote best practices for authoring characters to help our artists do their best work

What you'll bring

• Our ideal candidate will bring the following skills and experience:
• Experience creating character art and/or supporting a character art team using industry-standard art applications (Maya, Substance, ZBrush, etc)
• Experience working with character shaders (node-based or HLSL)
• Proficiency in Python or similar language, ideally with experience creating scripts for Maya or 3ds Max
• Effective collaborator with growth mindset and desire to help others to do their best work
• Strong verbal and digital communication skills. Fluent in rendering, memory, lighting, animation and other character-related topics
• Experience with Houdini or other procedural tools is a bonus
• Critical eye for visual quality. Art or Programming degree is a bonus

This is a fantastic opportunity to make “world-class games” with an established, talented, and collaborative team at one of the industry’s most exciting first-party game studios.

Playground Games is an equal opportunities studio and encourages candidates of all backgrounds to apply.