Senior VFX Artist

Senior VFX Artist - Maxis

At Maxis, we excel at outrageous thinking. It’s the fuel that inspires the best games in the world. We’re trailblazers and great storytellers. But it’s not just about amazing your peers – it’s 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.

We are looking for an experienced Senior VFX Artist. We are gearing up for our next big production and we need some passionate teammates to work with to bring our new characters and environments to life. If you are passionate about VFX pipelines, bringing the latest trends in technology to bear against your craft, and working with others to develop outstanding user experiences for new IPs … come join our team.

Responsibilities:
Work with Art Direction, Technical Partners, and Concept to develop the project's visual language for VFX.
Create the highest quality real-time visual effects, both in appearance and performance, while observing the project's aesthetic vision.
Work with Art, Design, and Animation teams to create beautiful effects that offer creative solutions to design challenges, add life to the game world, and create wow moments for the users.
Work with Development Directors to map out VFX development from pre-production to production; review feature designs, create asset lists, provide estimates, identify requirements.
Acknowledge our small team format and be comfortable with wearing many hats.
Work with Technical Art Directors, Engineers, and studio VFX Artists to develop industry-leading VFX pipelines.
Work with Technical & VFX Art partners across EA to develop and share pipelines and best practices.
Contribute original ideas on all aspects of game development.
Firefight production issues, trouble-shoot bugs, resolve roadblocks, and provide creative solutions to technical challenges.
Keep up with the latest trends and technical tools for developing effects content and inspire others through knowledge sharing.
Author stylized interpretations of real-world visual effects following our game’s art direction.
Technically deconstruct visual effects from other game and film references.
Create assets within the confines of real-time engine memory and performance constraints, and optimize effects to achieve the highest visual quality.
Create advanced materials and effects for control in level through parameters.
Work in a group and also operate autonomously with the ability to self-critique.
Receive and apply feedback provided by the VFX lead and Director.
Report to the VFX Development Director.

Qualifications:
Experience

5+ years of production experience using game engines to create real-time VFX with a supporting body of work.
Served as a Senior or Lead VFX Artist on a published AAA title and have shipping experience on multiple game titles.
Experience creating advanced real-time visual effects out of a variety of building blocks including particles, static textures, animated textures, lights, post processing, materials, meshes and shaders.
Experience producing effects such as smoke, fire, clouds, water, steam, and explosions.
Excellent composition/framing skills and sense of scale, timing, detail, form, texture and color.
Experience developing visual language across an ecosystem of effects.
Experience working in visual scripting environments such as Unreal Engine’s Niagara & Blueprints, Unity's VFX Graph, and supporting DCC apps like Houdini, Maya, FumeFX, Nuke, and Substance Designer.
Experience with in engine lighting, post effects, and Physically Based shading models.
Experience with runtime dynamic systems for physics-based animation, impact interactions, destruction, water, cloth & hair sim.
Excellent working knowledge of Maya, general understanding of animation/modeling/texturing and instancing pipelines.
Expert experience creating 3D assets, materials, and hand painted/rendered textures in other packages to support effects (e.g. Houdini, Nuke, Substance Designer, Photoshop, After Effects).
Commitment to personal and peer development, sharing best practices, staying current with the state-of-the-art in visual effects.

Skills

Passion for making and playing games.
Experience in game development for PC, Mobile, next-gen console (XB1/PS4) platforms.
Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent.
Experience in shader and material development.
Experience using PIX, GPAD, or other GPU profiling tools.
Experience and comfort with one or more scripting/programming languages (MEL, Python, C#, C++).
The ability to read and write shader source code using HLSL or GLSL.
Background in photography, painting, concept art, or animation.
Experience with latest modeling, sculpting and animation techniques.
Experience with Houdini, Maya Bifrost, and FumeFX.

Portfolio Requirements - It is required that you submit a portfolio of your work with your application. You may do so by providing a link or attaching documents to your resume. All portfolios must contain a detailed breakdown of the work. It must be very clear what you were responsible for.

Please provide as many examples of the following as you can:
Ability effects (e.g. cast, projectile, impact)
Environmental effects (e.g. smoke, fire, clouds, water, steam, and explosions)
Cinematic effects

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