Senior Technical Artist (Character) - The Sims

$115,100 - $161,200/Yr

Electronic Arts - Redwood City, CA

Full-time - Senior

Remote - Redwood City, CA

Publishing Industries

About the position

As a Senior Technical Artist (Character) at Maxis, you will play a crucial role in pushing the boundaries of character technology for The Sims franchise. This position involves collaboration with various teams to enhance character development practices and pipelines, ensuring high-quality character look development and performance. You will be responsible for creating prototypes, defining performance requirements, and resolving production issues, all while contributing to a creative and inclusive environment.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Art & Animation Directors, Engineers, Character & Animation Leads to achieve look development, content pipeline, and runtime implementation goals.
• Create character look development prototypes, applying latest technologies to aesthetic and performance goals.
• Collaborate with technical directors to define character performance requirements, diagnose, profile, and manage content costs.
• Help develop a technical character pipeline from Maya to Unreal.
• Firefight production issues, investigating urgent issues and resolving roadblocks.
• Collaborate with teams across the studio and EA to improve character development practices and pipelines.
• Create solid documentation and training material.

Requirements

• Production experience in Unreal Editor with a focus on character pipelines, including skeletal mesh actors, rigs & animations workflows, blueprints.
• Understanding of human and creature anatomy, proportion, silhouette, & topology and techniques to create foundational models and textures.
• 5 years of experience of Maya and industry leading tools for character development (Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, Marmoset Toolbag, etc).
• Proficiency in Unreal Materials with a focus on character look development.
• Fundamentals in PBR and proficiency in Substance Designer and Painter workflows.
• 1 years of experience with runtime dynamics Cloth & Hair and related authoring techniques.
• 1 years of experience designing and overseeing large character part systems.
• Proficiency in Python, Mel, and developing and maintaining artists production tools.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience developing and maintaining Maya riggs for game characters.
• Experience developing for iOS/Android.
• Experience developing for console hardware (XB1/XBX/PS4/PS5).

Benefits

• Paid time off (3 weeks per year to start)
• 80 hours per year of sick time
• 16 paid company holidays per year
• 10 weeks paid time off to bond with baby
• Medical/dental/vision insurance
• Life insurance
• Disability insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Vacation (3 weeks per year to start) for British Columbia
• 10 days per year of sick time for British Columbia
• Paid top-up to EI/QPIP benefits up to 100% of base salary when welcoming a new child (12 weeks for maternity, and 4 weeks for parental/adoption leave)
• Extended health/dental/vision coverage for British Columbia