3D Artist (Character Creator)

Project description

We are seeking generalist 3D artists with experience in both real-time and cinematic rendering and a strong understanding of contemporary workflows. The project focuses on training machine learning networks designed to assist artists and game developers by enhancing rendering performance and quality. The training process addresses a wide range of complex scenarios in advanced shading, lighting, motion, post-processing, upscaling, and antialiasing. Each scenario requires high-quality ground truth data that accurately reflects production standards in cinematic CGI and game development. Throughout the project, artists will work with various modern, industry-standard technologies and software. The primary rendering engines used include Blender Cycles, Unreal Engine, and custom renderers based on GLTF, USD, and MaterialX data.

Responsibilities

• Create a wide variety of 3D Character assets in Character Creator, with quality and techniques matching current generation of game graphics. Setup characters based on specific description (with focus on technical aspects of the model and material above aesthetic or stylistic) Setup Character Morphs, poses and clothing for character Export and setup characters with Materials Artists are expected to handle both custom content creation workflows and be able to adapt and improve existing assets, targeting performance or cinematic quality or finding a balance between both.

SKILLS

Must have

• Character Creation and being able to create a photorealistic human from scratch using Reallusion Character Creator OR any professional sculpting tool such as ZBrush. Solid experience working with content for Unreal Engine or other modern game engine (at least 3 years). Understanding PBR workflows, material composition, and optimization. Experience building and texturing both game-ready and cinematic characters in Blender, Substance – knowledge of common texturing pipelines for Unreal, Cycles using procedural approaches where appropriate. Solid experience with characters is required – artists need to be able to adjust character materials to properly highlight skin, cloth, hair, create new material maps for SSS and translucency, wrinkle maps. Pose and set up facial expression, being able to redo the hair system from scratch (improve from card-based to curve-based, as an example). Portfolio is mandatory. We’re looking for examples of high-quality photorealistic current/next-gen graphics game characters, made either with Character Creator or done from scratch with sculpting and polymodeling, with breakdowns for materials, rigged and driven systems, facial morphs, hair systems.

Nice to have

Character sculpting and being able to create a photorealistic human from scratch, using common modeling techniques (sculpting in ZBrush or Blender, making animation-ready topology and facial animation morphs). Animation and rigging. The project occasionally requires work with animation assets, motion capture and motion matching data, so the artist's ability to modify character's skeleton and rigging (in context of Blender and Unreal Engine) according to the task would greatly streamline the process. Any experience with this process would be appreciated, including something as simple as UE5 skeleton retargeting. Familiarity with MaterialX and OpenPBR. One of the major parts of the project is related to the cutting edge of rendering technology, such as Academy Software MaterialX and OpenPBR standards. Familiarity with them will be a great headstart for an artist working on related tasks. Experience with UE5 Substrate - a new advanced material system designed to work with path tracing, and a skillset closely related to MaterialX and OpenPBR.