Senior Lighting Artist

Description

The Senior Lighting Artist will work in a cooperative, international, cross-disciplinary team environment, possessing solid artistic skills, including a thorough understanding of color theory, composition, light, and form. They should have experience with a 3D CG package, demonstrating a solid understanding of rendering, lighting, shading networks, polygonal modeling, and texture UV’s. They should also demonstrate a strong ability to utilize in-house tools to solve technical problems and improve performance as well as interacting with engineers to help develop new tools and workflows.

Responsibilities:

• Involved in look-development around key surfaces and shaders to ensure lighting delivers against visual reference
• Creating both the exterior and interior lighting within environments and cut scenes.
• Placing and adjustment of light sources within the environment.
• Tweaking of shading materials and textures to improve the perception of the lighting.
• Post processing; color grading, exposure, SSAO, bloom, tone mapping curves etc.
• Contributing to the development and placement of special effects related to lighting and atmosphere, such as light flares, fog, god rays and camera optics.
• Prototyping the use of lighting technology to reach the visual targets defined by the art direction.
• Profile existing and future levels to maximize the quality of lighting on characters and environments while staying within performance budgets.

Experience & Skills:

• Experience in creating and shipping AAA quality titles as a real-time lighting artist.
• Deep understanding of CG lighting technology, both real-time and software rendering.
• Strong sense of lighting theory; color space, exposure, light fixtures, natural light, reflections etc.
• Good understanding of cinematography and dramaturgy; the use of camera technology, scene blocking and lighting to set the mood.
• Good understanding and experience with physical based lighting system
• Being pro-active in the use of lighting as a powerful tool in gameplay clarity. For example; to guide the player forward, highlight objectives and enemies.
• An ability to thoroughly digest the art direction and be a champion for executing it in the game.
• Skilled at balancing visual quality against performance requirements.
• Thorough knowledge of the game development process.
• Great communication skills and an ability to work autonomously with minimal guidance.
• Working knowledge of Maya, and/or other commercial 3D authoring packages.

Requirements:

• International travel may be required as part of the role
• Willing to relocate to Frankfurt am Main, Germany
• Excellent English communication and written skills