Lead VFX Artist

We have a fantastic opportunity for an experienced and ambitious VFX artist to join us and work on exciting new projects in our Total war franchise.
We are looking for a talented Lead VFX Artist to join our team and inspire the creative vision and world class results of VFX in Total War. You will be working on new projects with your highly skilled VFX artists in the mature and experienced Total War team. You will have the opportunity for personal and professional development alongside some of the best creatives in the industry with a huge impact on the game experience and visual spectacle across many titles.   

Key Responsibilities:

• Work with Art directors across different projects to define the art style for VFX.
• Create world class VFX content for previsualisation, benchmarks, and visual development.
• Ensure the VFX team are empowered to create rich and varied effects and reach benchmark quality, with strong leadership and regular feedback.
• Lead the VFX and lighting artists, and develop the team with training, mentorship and career development.  
• Collaborate on hiring plan, handle recruitment and onboarding of new hires.
• Work with the production team to plan the VFX content and deliver VFX work on schedule and to the highest standards.
• Maintain team health and wellbeing, while motivating the team to be productive and proactive.
• Set art standards in conjunction with the technical teams to ensure the VFX are performant and consistent across all projects.
• Research emerging visual effects technology, plan roadmap of technical improvements to keep competitive with industry trends.
• Work closely with design, animation, and other teams to ensure VFX is fully integrated in the game experience.
• Work with graphics, tools and other teams to build and maintain an efficient VFX and lighting pipeline.
• Collaborate across the franchise to seek out opportunities to enrich the game further with VFX of various types and lighting effects.
• Work with external contractors to provide required resource for the products we are creating.

Knowledge, Skill and Experience 

Essential

• 5+ years’ experience of working in game development. 3+ shipped titles.
• Extensive experience of real-time VFX authoring tools.
• Expert knowledge of one or more 3d packages.
• Strong knowledge of photoshop, substance, and other 2d editing or texturing software.
• Ability to create animated textures, simulations, and associated related 2d content.
• Ability to create meshes, shaders and materials, and associated content for mesh based VFX.
• Basic animation understanding and skills to implement this in VFX for timing.
• Experience in lighting and image processing.
• Understanding of colour theory, visual design, and composition.
• Proactive, results-oriented, practical approach, with excellent time management skills.
• Understanding of VFX performance and experience planning and optimising for various platforms.
• Excellent interpersonal and leadership skills.
• Excellent proactive problem-solving skills.
• Strong awareness of industry technology trends
• Love of games!

 Desirable

• Experience of leading a team.
• Experience on AAA titles.
• Unreal/Unity or other commercial engine experience.
• Experience working with contractors or outsourcers
• Experience developing FX for strategy games.
• Technical understanding of rendering, lighting and physics.
• Experience profiling and optimising games.
• Art or games degree.
• Knowledge of Houdini, Embergen, Pflow, thinking particles, tyflow, fumefx, phoenixfd or any offline rendering FX related tools or workflows.
• Knowledge of destruction simulations.
• Skills in HLSL or other shader languages.

Note: Applications for this role must include a portfolio/showreel (or link to a portfolio/showreel). Applications that do not have this information will not be considered.

About Creative Assembly
 
It’s an exciting time to be a part of our craft-led studio as we push boundaries, creating deep and detailed experiences that last.
Our teams are diverse from across the world, from trainees to industry veterans who constantly challenge us and make sure we are striving for the best within our games and our studio life. We are united through our shared values of Quality, Focus, Teamwork, Respect and Trust and we win awards for our culture and our people-centric approach, having won a Best Place to Work Award for five consecutive years. We invest in our people, the studio, and our projects. We’ll give you the creative freedom, tools, support, and development to achieve your potential.
Our studios are based in Horsham, UK and Sofia, Bulgaria, including several bespoke state-of-the-art audio suites and a dedicated motion capture facility.