Lead VFX Artist

Job Description

We are looking for a highly skilled Lead VFX Artist to join our growing team. By working with our revolutionary patented technology and joining forces across our art, design and engineering teams, we enable our artists to create spectacular and compelling visual effects. This is certainly true in our exciting new AAA title where visual effects play a major role in the player experience.

This is a unique opportunity to be at the heart of the design and delivery of the next flagship PlayStation IP. You will have a meaningful role to play in creating, shaping and delivering the visual effects that excite millions and bring our worlds to life. The good artist has a passion for crafting, while building, mentoring and developing a team of artists. This role will involve directing all aspects of producing high quality and optimized visual effects.

Skills and Requirements:

• Responsible for delivering high quality, performing visual effects on all of our projects, on time and on budget, while amplifying our artistic value at scale.
• Establish artistic direction and quality for all artists in our projects and be responsible for the ability of our team and partners to implement and achieve this quality bar with clear, concise and effective advice and feedback.
• You will play an active role in evaluating and maintaining the VFX Art production schedule. Ensure that our scope, timing and approach are scalable and flexible to meet our global development demands. Oversee and communicate the progress of the project in your area.
• You are responsible for developing a long-term strategy for your region, ensuring your team is aligned and feeding into the overall strategies.
• Drive regular and frequent review processes, including setting up reviews for artistic leadership and broader decision makers.
• Ensure efficient production for our VFX Art by being responsible for developing and maintaining processes, workflows, documentation and confirming team expectations are accurate, communicated and understood. You will continuously optimize, automate and identify risks and issues in pipelines and workflows; Proactively research and oversee the implementation of solutions.
• You will lead, coach and develop a specialized team. Manage their personal and professional growth. You must follow established line management practices in the art department and at the London studio.
• Participate in defining strategy, processes, best practices and broader goals for the Art Department, designed to improve our teams year on year as a member of the Department Management Group.
• Collaborate with Art Management on staffing, hiring and project onboarding. Anticipate skills and resource needs, lead your team’s recruitment, and act as a consultant on department-level gaps and solutions.
• Be directly involved in supplier relationships, ensuring stable, long-term and mutually beneficial partnerships for our teams.

Essential Knowledge and skills:

• Creative at heart, the candidate must have experience directing and delivering high performance, high quality VFX for AAA titles.
• Ability to recognize quality and excellence, with proficiency in using visual language to support rewarding player experiences and gaming moments
• Demonstrate a strong command of timing, weight, realism, color, volume, energy, particle aesthetics and/or animation principles
• Expert understanding of 3D packages (eg Maya, Max or Houdini)
• Heavy user of game engine tools and pipelines. (Experience with proprietary engines and tools is a plus)
• Professional experience with node-based particle systems and geometry-based visual effects.
• Professional experience with real-time shaders
• Strong knowledge of game engine limitations; memory, GPU and CPU performance (Bonus – VFX performance profiling experience with in-engine tools)
• Ability to work collaboratively within the team, as well as independently, and drive initiatives to completion.

Desirable Knowledge and Skills:

• Ability to create all the art required for particle effects and atmospheric levels.
• Professional experience with Houdini
• Exceptionally adept at simulating fluid, soft or rigid bodies
• Understand scripting and coding principles
• Traditional 2D skills

Surveillance:

In this role, you will be expected to build the team, so we need someone who is self-starter and a great teammate. We hope you are the type of manager who leads, constantly wants to improve, and can motivate, empower, and lead a team.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

We encourage you to do your best at work. Inclusiveness is one of our studio values, which means we embrace different perspectives to fuel our creativity and know our games are stronger for it!

It is important to us that our teams are passionate about diversity and inclusion. They need to understand that these words speak to people’s experiences that may differ from their own. We encourage our teams to train and show their support and commitment to DE&I (diversity, equity and inclusion). For example, some of our outreach activities include conferences, mentoring, school talks, roundtables and more.

We therefore welcome applications from all underrepresented groups in the games industry. We can offer training to improve our team’s skills, so if you feel you don’t meet 100% of the job criteria, we strongly encourage you to apply and look forward to hearing from you.

About the Company:

At PlayStation London Studio, we’re on a mission to create iconic, award-winning games. Our next PlayStation 5 online multiplayer game will center around a brand new IP that we are very excited about.

Our new game is close to our hearts, because the whole team collaborated in the development of the concept from the very beginning. We’ve seen this idea grow from a seed, and now we’re looking for new starters to continue our journey on shaping our plans for this AAA project.

We’re also part of the PlayStation Studios family, a collective of teams – from Insomniac to Naughty Dog and many more. As such, we have a strong support system that often shares industry advancements so that all of our studios, individually, lead the way in creating memorable gaming experiences.

How to Apply
Click on the link below to apply:

Click Here

All applications must include a Portfolio, CV/Resume, and any relevant documentation