Senior Character Artist

Naughty Dog•Santa Monica, CA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

Naughty Dog is seeking a highly technical and artistic Senior Character Artist to join their team. This role involves creating characters and creatures, as well as developing pipelines to streamline and enhance the creation of compelling characters that fit seamlessly within the studio's narrative-driven worlds. The artist will collaborate with other departments and disciplines to find artistic solutions to technical obstacles, ensuring the character pipeline remains at the forefront of AAA development.

Requirements

Highly skilled at working with and defining standards for PBR materials, topology, and in game character pipelines
Experience developing shaders with technical artists and programmers
Highly skilled at sculpting, modeling, texturing, shading characters and assets for games
High level knowledge of hair curve and card creation for next gen games
Keen eye to form, lighting, colors and composition
Very strong portfolio showing high quality characters
At least 5 years of experience as a character artist, working on at least one AAA title

Nice To Haves

Intermediate knowledge of python scripting, not required, but a plus

Responsibilities

Work with artists, technical artists, and engineers to design, implement and maintain new workflows that will help streamline and enhance our tools, shaders, and processes
Use provided concept art and references to create highly detailed character and creature models
Create high poly models, UVs, in game topology and textures to ensure high quality in game characters that work within our technical constraints, while also looking for areas to develop and push past our current boundaries
Monitor the needs of rigging, animation, and design to ensure clear characters in game
Maintain a clear and consistent workflow under an established schedule
Work closely to FX and Lighting artists to create characters that meet artistic and technical requirements
Provide direction to character artists for aesthetic and technical considerations
Work closely with the Tool and Engine Team to develop new or improve upon old techniques to improve character model quality
Work closely with Leads, Principals and Directors to keep quality and style consistent across all characters
Help document new and existing pipelines to streamline processes for internal and external artists
Act as a power user to evaluate and demo new software and tools from 3rd party developers for the character pipeline