Technical Artist

Company: Electronic Arts Inc
Location: Redwood City
Posted on: June 8, 2021

Job Description:

Senior Technical Artist Generalist

Location: EA Redwood Shores

At Maxis, we excel at outrageous thinking. Its the fuel that inspires the best games in the world. Were trailblazers and great storytellers. But its not just about amazing your peers its about amazing yourself and our fans. Take risks. Work with dazzling minds and dare to dream big. Together, we can change the way millions play every day. The Sims 4 has an extremely unique player base, with 60% of our audience being women between the ages of 18-24. We are looking for someone with deep insights on how to create the best experience for our players.

Job Summary

Maxis is looking for a Technical Artist Generalist. We have projects in both production and pre production phases, and we are looking for talented teammates to collaborate with to bring our new characters & worlds to life. If you are passionate about bringing the latest trends in technology to bear against your craft, and collaborating with others to develop best in class experiences for new and existing IPs come join our team.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Technical & Art Directors, Engineers, and Art Discipline Leads to develop industry leading content pipelines.
• Develop tools and workflows to empower world building, character, & animation artists to craft best in class content.
• Develop and maintain pipelines supporting large libraries of game art content in live service ecosystems.
• Work with TDs and TADs to develop content performance plans, and monitor performance to provide performance guidance, based on established metrics and reporting methods.
• Develops tools, pipelines, & processes for performance management aligned towards meeting art production goals.
• Firefight production issues, investigating hot issues and resolving roadblocks.
• Collaborate with Technical Art partners across EA to develop and share pipelines and best practices.
• Keep up with the latest trends and technical tools for developing content and inspire others through knowledge sharing.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 6+ years of tech art, tech animation, and/or world development experience in Maya for video games.
• Served as a Senior Tech Artist on a published (or soon to be) video game project.
• Significant experience working in Unreal Editor.
• Experience with Unreal Blueprint and/or asset scripting.
• Expert proficiency with Maya and modern DCC applications.
• Proficiency in Python & Mel (C# and other languages a plus.)
• Experience writing tools to aid animators, character, and object artist workflows.
• Ability to collaborate and communicate effectively across multiple disciplines to achieve team technical objectives.
• Ability to communicate thru solid documentation of developed pipelines and workflows.
• Experience in Perforce or other version control software.
• Well versed in Shotgun, Jira or other bug tracking and project management software.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience developing for iOS/Android.
• Experience developing for console hardware (XB1/XBX/PS4/PS5).
• Machine learning experience, with applications to content creation.
• Experience with Unreal Lighting, Post, and Niagara Visual Effects systems.
• In depth experience with creating and maintaining high end character rigs.
• Aptitude in working with keyframe animation and motion capture data, troubleshooting motion data issues, and ensuring animation best practices.
• Experience developing and maintaining animation blend trees a plus.
• The ability to read and write shader source code using HLSL or GLSL.
• Experience with shader networks and procedural texturing.
• Solid understanding of PBR rendering and material / light interactions.
• Skills in Substance Designer & Painter workflows.
• Houdini procedural workflow experience.
• Background in photography, painting, concept art, or animation.

Keywords: Electronic Arts Inc, Redwood City , Technical Artist, Other , Redwood City, California