Lighting Artist

Keywords Studios

12h•Remote

About The Position

Keywords Studios is seeking a Lighting Artist to create high-quality, visually compelling lighting for environments and cinematics. The role involves producing lighting that aligns with the project’s artistic direction and storytelling through mood, tone, and atmosphere, as well as developing lighting optimized for real-time game engines. The artist will work closely with the Art Director and cross-functional teams to maintain artistic consistency and quality, ensuring lighting meets performance, memory, and platform-specific requirements. This position also requires staying current with industry trends, contributing to pipeline improvements, and continuously pushing visual quality and innovation.

Requirements

Extensive experience as a Lighting Artist within the video game industry, with a strong portfolio showcasing high-quality real-time game assets.
Strong understanding of lighting, composition, colour theory, and visual storytelling.
Experience creating optimized assets for modern real-time game engines such as Unreal Engine or Unity.
Strong understanding of lighting tools (Lumen, light baking and post‑processing), performance optimization, and technical limitations across multiple gaming platforms.
Ability to work collaboratively within multidisciplinary teams, communicate ideas effectively, and incorporate feedback throughout production.
Knowledge of game development pipelines and the ability to adapt artistic styles to suit various game genres and target platforms.
Currently residing in Japan.
Possess valid authorization to work in Japan.

Nice To Haves

Passion for gaming and a strong understanding of market trends, player expectations, and gaming cultures across PC, Console, and Nintendo platforms.
Experience successfully guiding and communicating with other art teams to ensure artistic vision and asset quality are maintained from concept through to final in-game implementation.

Responsibilities

Create high-quality, visually compelling lighting for environments and cinematics.
Produce lighting that aligns with the project’s artistic direction and storytelling, through mood, tone and atmosphere.
Develop lighting optimized for real-time game engines.
Work closely with the Art Director to maintain the overall art direction.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams throughout the production pipeline to ensure artistic consistency and quality.
Participate in reviews, feedback sessions, and iterative development processes.
Ensure lighting meets performance, memory, and platform-specific requirements across a variety of platforms.
Collaborate closely with environment, VFX and technical art teams to integrate lighting with assets and pipelines.
Apply strong understanding of lighting for real-time performance.
Maintain consistency in quality while adhering to technical constraints and engine limitations.
Troubleshoot and resolve creative and technical lighting challenges.
Stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, tools, and workflows.
Contribute ideas and improvements to pipelines and production processes.
Continuously push the visual quality and innovation of game art production.