At Velan Studios, we foster a culture of curiosity. Our games embrace diversity and are fueled by the adventurous spirit of our team. We are the creative minds behind titles like Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, Knockout City, and Hot Wheels Rift Rally, and our journey continues! Our studio's mission is to pioneer groundbreaking gaming experiences and reimagine play in new ways. We're committed to pushing the boundaries of traditional gaming, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, and revolutionizing the industry one game at a time.
About the Role
If you’re half coder and half artist – you get both and can translate from art to tech and back again, so the entire development team gets the most out of the tools to build the next great game experiences of the future.
The ideal candidate is a highly technical visual artist with specific interests and expertise in lighting, VFX, and materials. This role collaborates closely with the Tech Art Lead, the Tools Team, the Graphics team, as well as all of the individual artists throughout the production process to help define the look and feel, optimize performance, and execute on bringing the game to release.
Responsibilities
Be a team player and help guide artists as well as engineers, designers, and QA towards the best visual and technical solutions for the project.
Be equally comfortable creating beautiful content yourself while also using your skills in various programs to help the rest of the art team create high quality realistic and stylized optimized in-game assets themselves.
Collaborate with the Tech Art Lead and the Graphics team to profile the performance of the game and optimize content to hit framerate targets.
Contribute to peer reviews, troubleshoot, problem solve, and give and receive constructive feedback.
Be comfortable acting autonomously and able to self-direct tasks when needed.
Able to work on multiple projects at once and easily understands how to context switch.
Help identify production bottlenecks and contribute to the internal art tools library both on a project level as well as at a studio level to help build organized and efficient workflows.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Graphic Art or related field or equivalent experience preferred.
Experience with physically-based rendering.
Proficiency with shader development (node-based or HLSL/GLSL).
Experience with visual scripting such as Blueprints in Unreal Engine.
Solid fundamentals: A strong understanding of light & color, shape, composition, and surface types.
Expert in Maya, Substance, Adobe Creative Suite, etc.
Interest & knowledge of modern lighting techniques for real-time and offline graphics.
Experience working in Unreal, Unity or other AAA engines.
Ability to collaborate with other artists, designers, and engineers.
Bonus Skills
Modeling, texturing, character, environment, concept or illustration expertise.
Experience with a scripting language such as Python.
Interest & experience with procedural system tools such as Houdini
Interest & experience profiling and optimizing shaders, vfx, geometry, etc.
