Videogame – Realtime Senior VFX Artist

The Role: Work embedded with the development team to conceive, prototype, and ship stylised-realism VFX for characters and environments. You’ll own lookdev, integration, and performance in our proprietary engine, collaborating tightly with Animation, Design, Tech Art, Environment/Lighting, and Audio to keep effects readable, on-style, and within budget.

What You’ll Do: Concept to Ship: Explore references, sketch/test looks, build prototypes, and take effects through production to final. Author effects: Create particle systems/emitters, shader/material graphs, flipbooks, mesh-based FX, decals, and simple UI cues. Readability & style: Nail timing, silhouettes, value/color, and screen economy so FX land under gameplay camera and lighting—expressive yet grounded. Integration: Drive hooks via engine scripting or animation/gameplay events; expose tunables so designers and animators can iterate safely. Performance: Profile with engine tools/frame captures; manage bounds, LODs, culling, update rates, and quality tiers to hit budgets. Libraries & templates: Maintain textures/flipbooks/curves and reusable system templates; partner with Tech Art on validators and small utilities. Cross-discipline cohesion: Sync with Lighting on exposure/grade, with Design on telegraphy, and with Audio on beats/sync. Documentation: Provide succinct breakdowns and parameters so other pods can reuse and extend systems.

Requirements: 5+ years creating real-time VFX for games; 1+ shipped AA/AAA title (or equivalent live product). Strong game-engine VFX background: modern particle tools, material/shader graphing, scripting/visual scripting, and timeline/cinematic tools; solid GPU/CPU trade-off intuition. Authoring chops: flipbook creation (Substance/Houdini/Photoshop), ribbons/trails, mesh/lighting interactions, decals. Proven eye for timing, shape language, value/color, and gameplay readability in a stylised-realism aesthetic. Performance-minded under production lighting; comfortable profiling and optimizing. Clear communicator; reliable in a remote, multi-time-zone team.

Nice to Have: Houdini for VFX meshes/flipbooks and utility tools. Fluid/volumetric lookdev (smoke/fire) and stylised FX techniques. Basic C++/Python for tooling; custom data bindings/interfaces to drive FX. Portfolio Show final, in-engine VFX with succinct breakdowns: particle graphs, shader snippets, flipbook sources, perf notes (overdraw/shader cost/calls), and gameplay captures under production lighting. If we can’t see process and results, we can’t assess.

What Success Looks Like: Effects are clear, on-style, and on budget —no late surprises. Systems and templates are reusable, speeding up other pods. Tight integration with Design/Animation results in fewer iteration loops and faster approvals.