Art Outsource Lead

Description

Blizzard is looking for highly motivated and talented artists to join its embedded outsourcing team in Irvine California.  This is an art generalist position requiring hands on direction, management, and engine integration of a wide range of assets including characters, weapons, and environment props.

The ideal candidate would have strong art direction and leadership skills to be able to manage, art direct, and provide detailed feedback to external art vendors. They must also be an experienced and flexible artist, able to put final touches on any game asset from characters to props, then be able implement those assets into a wide range of game engines.  Finally they would coordinate with team leads to build relationships, track assets, and help identify art needs.

This is a staff position at our Irvine, CA studio.

• Manage communication and provide feedback to artists, and help maintain a strong creative relationship between external and internal art teams.
• Generate detailed documentation, video reference, and examples of art asset production, procedures, and engine requirements to support the external vendors.
• Own the quality control over all incoming art assets, providing detailed feedback and approvals to the vendor in order to deliver quality assets to the development team.
• Implement approved assets into the game engine, along with making any needed fixes to keep assets consistent and game ready.
• Personally create high quality character models, weapons, and environment assets for a variety of different projects and art styles
• Work closely with the art director, art leads, production team, and outsource manager to determine outsourcing needs, pipelines, budgets and costs for art assets.
• Coordinate with the outsource manager to schedule and track incoming assets.
• Identify and research possible vendors.
• Travel may be necessary to help train and coach approved vendors.

• Experience in game art asset creation in a variety of software packages including Maya, 3ds Max, Zbrush, and Photoshop
• Strong character, weapon, and environment modeling experience and skills a must
• Clear and concise communication, leadership, and people skills
• Must be highly organized, self-driven, customer focused, and a great team player
• Understanding of the visual style of Blizzard games and a passion to push it to the next level
• Have shipped AAA PC or console title as an environment, character, or technical artist

• Experience working with outsourcing teams
• Experience in an art director or lead artist role
• Fluency in a language other than English, including Chinese, German, Spanish, Italian, or Russian

• Resume
• Cover Letter which should include:
• Why you are interested in working at Blizzard
• What games you are currently playing