Hair Artist

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Design high-quality real-time hair, fur, eyebrows, eyelashes, facial hair, and other grooming elements for both main and supporting characters.

• Create hair grooms that accurately reflect the desired style, silhouette, and personality of each character.

• Work closely with Character Artists and Art Directors to achieve the expected visual quality and artistic vision.

• Optimize hair assets to comply with performance, memory, and platform specifications while maintaining visual integrity.

• Integrate and fine-tune hair assets within the game engine, ensuring proper functionality with shading, simulation, and animation systems.

• Collaborate with Technical Artists to tackle technical challenges related to grooming workflows, shaders, simulation, and rendering.

• Ensure consistency across multiple characters while accommodating a diverse range of hairstyles and artistic styles.

• Diagnose and resolve issues related to deformation, physics, LODs, and asset implementation.

• Contribute to the ongoing enhancement of grooming workflows, documentation, and production pipelines.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive professional experience as a Hair Artist, Groom Artist, or Character Artist with a focus on hair for AAA console or PC games.

• Strong portfolio showcasing realistic or highly stylized real-time hair creation across various characters.

• In-depth understanding of hair grooming principles, including shape, flow, layering, and silhouette.

• Proficiency with industry-standard grooming tools such as XGen, Ornatrix, Houdini, Blender Hair, or similar software.

• Experience creating real-time hair cards and/or strand-based hair based on project needs.

• Solid grasp of hair textures, shaders, materials, transparency, and rendering techniques.

• Experience implementing hair assets within contemporary game engines like Unreal Engine or Unity.

• Good knowledge of optimization techniques for real-time character rendering.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively within multidisciplinary and distributed teams.

• Self-driven, organized, and capable of managing tasks independently.

• Desirable

• Experience in launching one or more AAA titles featuring high-quality digital characters.

• Familiarity with strand-based grooming workflows in Unreal Engine 5.

• Knowledge of hair simulation, cloth simulation, and character rigging processes.

• Experience creating fur or creature grooms.

• Understanding of scan-based character pipelines and physically based rendering workflows.

• Experience mentoring artists or contributing to grooming standards and best practices.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits package.

• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects with a talented team.

• Continuous learning and professional development opportunities.

• Flexible work environment and work-life balance.