TECHNICAL ARTIST
Giant Squid is a small game development studio in Santa Monica, CA, headed by Matt Nava, former Art Director at thatgamecompany, known for his work on the award winning game “Journey.” We are focused on creating innovative and deeply moving games that will inspire players, challenge convention, and push the boundaries of experiential and narrative interactive entertainment into new and unexpected areas.
We are looking for a technical artist who will provide support for our artists and designers. Giant Squid is a heavily art-driven studio and your primary responsibility will be to maximize our artist’s output. To accomplish this, you will be investigating, designing, and implementing tool pipelines that iron out inefficiencies in content creation. In this role, you will have the opportunity to closely collaborate with Giant Squid’s top level talent on our highly anticipated first game project.
A deep knowledge of Maya and the art creation process will be key to creating efficient and intuitive tools. Experience with Python or MEL scripting will be critical to assisting with character animation rigs, custom mesh exporters, and other art utilities. In addition, creating engine side importers, shaders, and level design tools will be necessary to make sure the content creation process is smooth all the way from tool side to runtime.
The technical artist will also help with designing, maintaining, enforcing, and documenting proper content creation practices and standards. When we bring new designers and artists on board, you will be able to quickly get them up to speed with our pipeline.
Importantly, the technical artist will serve as both an advocate for the art department as well as a bridge between art and engineering. As the first line of defense for issues that arise in the art/design pipelines, you are able to handle a myriad of issues with scripting, automation and batch processing that would otherwise distract our programmers. Your skills will make taking designs all the way from concept to in game assets as painless a process as possible, for both the art and engineering departments.
Responsibilities:
- Extend artist tools (primarily Maya, Photoshop) with scripts and plugins to add features and aid workflow
- Perform R&D on new features and prototype their implementation from tool side to runtime
- Seek out new tools to integrate into our development process and teach their use to the team
- Aid communication between artists and programmers, and help find the best solutions given technical constraints
- Diagnose issues with our tools, pipeline, or content
- Content performance analysis and optimization
- Collision and destructibles authoring
Requirements:
- Very experienced with MEL or Python scripting for Maya
- Experience with other common artist tools such as Photoshop and Mudbox
- Modelling, Texturing, Rigging experience
- Have shipped at least one title as a TA or equivalent experience
- Love of node editors, such as shader creation and gameplay logic
Bonus:
- Experience with industry middleware such as Unreal Engine
- Experience interfacing with the Maya sdk in native code
- Knowledge of technical details behind current graphics effects
Join Our Team!
If this sounds like you, submit applications to contact@giantsquidstudios.com.
Relocation to Santa Monica, CA, is required.