Environment Surfacing Artist - Houdini
Position location: Winnipeg, Toronto, or Vancouver
Tangent Animation is a high-end feature animation studio focused on delivering the best creative with the industries top talent. We are located in Winnipeg, Toronto, and Vancouver and we are growing!
Following our recent success with "Next Gen" (now on Netflix), Tangent Animation is expanding and looking for a Surfacing Artist, as well as introducing Houdini into our pipeline. If you are seeking to be a part of an exciting project and team-based environment, we’d love to hear from you.
Surfacing artists bring three-dimensional models to life; they add texture and color to the 3-D characters, environments, and props in an animated feature to enhance their visual appeal.
- -Meet production deadlines and communicate clearly with production management
- -Texture painting, procedural texturing, building shading networks and UV layout
- -Establish and create the final look of exterior and interior environments, through texturing, shading, displacement and plants scattering
- -Participate in reviews and offer insight/suggestions for improving art and workflow
- -Bring creative ideas and solutions to optimize the level of visual and technical quality
- -Experience in Environment building, artistically designing nature with ground scattering and particles.
Duties:
- Surfacing artists are master digital painters. They enhance the appearance of characters, props, and environments in an animated feature film according to the visual style set forth by the art director, production designer, and director of the film.
- The surfacing artist is responsible for technically demanding and complex surfacing setups.
- They work closely with the modeling and lighting departments to ensure that surfacing needs are met alongside the needs of other departments. These artists use computer rendering environments such as Blender, Substance Designer, Substance Painter and Photoshop to develop the needed surface materials, textures, and UV maps that overlay 3-D models.
- They must produce consistent, high-quality work while maintaining a steady flow of assignments into the pipeline and meeting rigid deadlines.
Requirements
- Being a surfacing artist requires creativity and an eye for design elements such as detail, scale, composition, color, and form.
- Experience with terrain and particles in Houdini.
- Experience with designing foliage with Houdini scattering tools.
- The artist must be able to learn new programs and create in different visual styles as required;
- An understanding of polygonal texturing and UV mapping and layout is necessary.
- Knowledge of modeling and lighting/shading is a plus, since surfacing artists work in tandem with these departments.
- Artists will be very desirable if they have additional experience in advanced surface types, PBR workflow, and subsurface scattering.
- Educational requirements are not as important to landing the job as relevant industry experience and a nice demo reel/portfolio, but a degree in computer graphics will give you a competitive edge.
- Be able to work in a team or individually and be a good communicator.
Benefits
Tangent Animation is a high-end feature animation studio focused on delivering the best creative with the industries top talent. Our locations are Winnipeg, Toronto, and Vancouver.
Tangent Animation is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodation upon request for candidates taking part in the recruitment process.
We thank you for your interest, however, only those candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.