Job description
That’s No Moon is an independent studio of storytellers and game-makers who believe in the power of narrative-driven experiences. With a diverse team of talented developers, from some of the top game studios in the world (Naughty Dog, Infinity Ward, Bungie), our shared vision is to create the future of AAA experiences with a culture of creativity, collaboration, and responsible production practices. Our passionate team of developers help shape our studio, our projects, and our future.
We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Technical Lighting Artist who will help make our development process more creator-centric by serving as a link between engineers and game creators. Your passion and expertise with the technical challenges of lighting will push the boundaries of the newest tools and workflows for in-game and cinematic AAA content. You will join a team of passionate, driven creatives striving to set the visual bar for lighting and push the industry to new heights of realism, gameplay, and storytelling!
Responsibilities:
- Contribute to the development of lighting tools and processes that help achieve a product’s visual style and encourage artistic technical evolution within the studio.
- Creates lighting setups, tools, shaders, and workflows as needed to increase the lighting team’s efficiency and work quality.
- Collaborate directly with the engineering team to improve the usability of content workflows and help steer the design of new features
- Educate artists on the theory behind PBR, best practices of tools, rendering and materials
- Monitor and optimize game rendering performance and memory usage and help development of tools to aid in this process
- Create example maps for testing, educational and corrective purposes
- Find and report rendering issues including bug submission, tracking status, monitoring pending integrations
- Point of contact when issues arise to allow for overall view of state of the lighting pipeline and offer a focused and timely response.
- Keeps aware of industry trends and technical techniques, evaluates competitive products, and determines areas we can improve or innovate, communicates innovations in a convincing way, and collaborates with the leadership team to develop plans for implementation.
- Serves as a technical resource for all phases of production and other studio art needs. This includes, but is not limited to conducting general research, developing cutting-edge tools and techniques, and testing new systems or tools. Providing training, transmitting industry related information, and conveying concerns in a constructive way by providing solutions to those concerns.
Requirements & Skills:
- 5+ yrs of experience working as a Technical Lighting Artist or related Rendering Pipeline role on PC or console hardware
- Experience working on at least 2+ released games.
- Experience with Unreal Blueprints and Sequencer.
- In depth knowledge of real time Physically Based Rendering theory and material authoring
- Skills to communicate shading and rendering features to the art and engineering teams
- Ability to translate requests into usable tools
- Expertise in game engine lighting solutions for both game play and cinematic systems.
- Curious in personality and ability to demonstrate pragmatic problem-solving skills
- Experience with a variety of programming and scripting languages including python and C++
- Understanding of lighting performance, tuning and memory budgets.
- Strong data management skills, with the ability to manage and track large amounts of data as they go through the art pipeline with attention to naming conventions, directory structures, and other processes.
- (Bonus) Basic knowledge of physical photography and how aperture, shutter speed, and focal length work together
- (Bonus) Experience adapting ideas from published papers into rendering and shading features
Qualities:
- Self-motivated and able to work well in a multi-discipline team environment, team-player
- Open to feedback but also possess an excellent capacity to solve creative and technical problems and present a compelling vision
- Experience teaching or training others in the skills of real-time lighting
- Love of learning, experimenting with new ideas and discovering ways to improve production workflows
- You love a good challenge and aren’t afraid to address technical issues you don’t know how to solve.
TNM considers a number of factors when determining each role’s base pay range, including industry benchmarks, location, experience, and other job specific skills. In addition to base pay, this role may be eligible for other incentive compensation including equity and profit share. The estimated base pay range for this role is U.S. only and not applicable for locations outside of the U.S.
The estimated base pay range for this role is: $120,000 - $155,000
TNM offers competitive and comprehensive benefits that include medical, dental, vision, 401(k) match, flexible PTO, supplemental life and disability, and more. Eligibility to participate in these benefits may vary based on country of residence and/or part-time or temporary employment status.
That’s No Moon is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ancestry, color, citizenship, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, pregnancy, age, national origin, disability status, legally protected physical or mental disability, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
To those interested in submitting for roles at That’s No Moon, we have a few reminders to ensure a safe application process.
1. If one of our recruiters reaches out to you, it will be with a “@thatsnomoon.com” email address. We do not email via personal email addresses either.
2. We do not conduct interviews via Discord or WhatsApp.
3. We will not ask you to provide sensitive personal information.
4. We will never request that you buy equipment specifically for your interview/test.
We are saddened that people are being taken advantage of and ask that, if you ever have any doubts about whether you are speaking to an official member of the That’s No Moon team, to reach out to our official social handles directly.
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