Senior Look Development Artist

Summary

Join Zoic Studios, a Visual Effects company specializing in high-end visual effects, as a Senior CG Environment Look Development Artist! This role involves generating textures and surfaces for high-quality, photo-real, and stylized CG assets for a stop-motion animated feature project. You will digitally create and implement CG assets, ensuring color and surfacing reflect project vision. Responsibilities include creating and refining materials, building shading networks, and working within a physically-based shading context. Collaboration with the Environments team and Lead CG Look Dev Artist is crucial to meet show standards. This position offers the option to work remotely from British Columbia or in our Vancouver studio.

Requirements

• 5+ years' experience in live-action or photoreal feature film production
• Advanced Katana experience
• Proficient in Renderman (or equivalent), Mari, and Substance Painter and Designer
• Experience working in a USD pipeline
• Proficient Look Development, R&D, and lighting skills from both an artistic and technical perspective
• Strong aesthetic sense and keen eye for detail
• Technical understanding of color space
• Efficient UV layout experience using a UDIM workflow
• Basic compositing skills in Nuke
• Strong communication, organizational, and time management skills to balance priorities under the pressure of a deadline-driven production
• Ability to take direction and implement feedback

Responsibilities

• Digitally create and implement CG assets for stop motion visual effects, ensuring color and surfacing of CG assets reflect the vision and requirements of the given project
• Create and refine materials to achieve the final look of environment assets and terrain, and build custom looks and materials for specialty assets
• Build and maintain show shading networks, master materials, and templates to support CG artists with final look development
• Work within a physically-based shading context, balancing and validating material responses across multiple assets
• Work alongside the Lead CG Look Dev Artist to ensure that assets and terrains and shots meet show standards
• Work with the Environments team to address supervisors' and directors' shading notes and provide training, as needed
• Support workflows for publishing and moving data between assets and lighting
• Troubleshoot production problems, such as common rendering and lighting technical issues, and create methods to minimize their impact
• Assist in the development of new tools and techniques to improve the asset development process

Preferred Qualifications

• Basic understanding of plate and image-based lighting, as well as full CG lighting, preferred
• Basic understanding of multi-pass rendering and 3D scene layout, preferred
• Houdini, Maya, and Zbrush knowledge, a plus

Benefits

• British Columbia Employees Pay Range: $45 - $65 (The actual base salary offered will depend on a variety of factors, including without limitation, the qualifications of the individual applicant for the position, years of relevant experience, level of education attained, certifications or other professional licenses held, and if applicable, the location of the position)
• At this time, we’re pleased to offer this role as an option to work from home OR work from our Vancouver studio in the beautiful Gastown area, close to the Waterfront Station in Downtown. (Remote is not available outside of BC; there is no hybrid)