Art

Senior VFX Artist - Permanent

OVERVIEW

At PlayStation London Studio, we are on a mission to make award-winning, landmark games. Our upcoming PlayStation 5 online multiplayer game will be focused on a brand-new IP we are extraordinarily excited about.

Our new game is close to our hearts, as the whole team collaborated on coming up with the concept from the very beginning. We’ve seen this idea grow from a seed, and now we’re looking for new starters to continue our journey on shaping our plans for this AAA project.

We’re also a part of the PlayStation Studios family, a collective of teams - from Insomniac to Naughty Dog and many more. As such, we have solid support system – often knowledge sharing industry advancements so that all our studios, individually lead the way to create memorable gaming experiences.

About Role

We are looking for a highly skilled Senior VFX Artist to join our growing team. Working with our ground breaking proprietary technology and joining forces across our Art, Design and Engineering teams we fully empower our artists to build compelling, visually spectacular effects. This is certainly true in our new and exciting AAA title were VFX plays a major role in the player experience.

The ideal artist stands out from the crowd, if your new to the games industry or a veteran of VFX, the most important thing is you differentiate yourself with creativity, execution, and passion

As pillars of our VFX team, they take ownership and responsibility for delivery of large areas of our Visual Effects and push the boundaries to deliver a unique player experience. Working closely with the Art Director, Lead Artist and Lead VFX Artist to contribute to crafting the vision of our projects in a truly collaborative environment.

Scope of Work

• Bring life and excitement to our projects through your design and implementation of compelling visual effects, which are to be used across combat, abilities, game environments, scripted moments, and UI.
• Expertly command our proprietary technology, tools and pipelines for technical setup, implementation, and troubleshooting of VFX in engine.
• Collaborate across Design, Animation, Engineering and Audio to ensure you are crafting satisfying VFX that meets the quality bar, art vision and maintains gameplay clarity.
• Work with our Lead VFX Artist, Art Leadership, and your peers to support the project vision, delivering industry leading quality and artistic fidelity, both directly and being responsible for internal artists or external partners.
• Maintain quality, efficiency, and consistency for VFX across the projects. Working with Technical Art, Engineering, and other Senior Artists, making changes or delegating tasks.
• Lead by example, taking ownership for large section of the project’s VFX. This involves both sharing knowledge across our teams and partners, but also responsibility for supporting planning, estimation and prioritisation of tasks, progress, and timeframes.
• You will work with other teams to improve our production pipeline for VFX, helping to identify where efficiencies are required, or to take on complex issues where they arise.
• Ability to work well as a team member or as a sub team lead.

Essential Knowledge & Skills

• Professional experience crafting high quality, realtime VFX.
• Ability to recognise quality and excellence, with a proficiency in using visual language to support rewarding player experiences and gameplay moments
• Demonstrate a strong command of timing, weight, realism, colour, volume, energy, particle aesthetics and/or animation principles
• Strong understanding of 3D packages (for example Maya, Max or Houdini)
• Advanced user of game engine tools and pipelines. (Proprietary engine and tools experience is a plus) Including:
  • Professional experience with node-based particle systems and geometry based visual effects.
  • Professional experience with realtime shaders
• Solid Knowledge of game engine limitations; memory, GPU, and CPU performance (Bonus – experience in profiling VFX performance with in-engine tools)
• Ability to work collaboratively across the team, as well as independently, and be able to drive initiatives through to completion.

Desirable Knowledge & Skills

• Ability to build all required art assets needed for particle effects and level atmospherics.
• Professional experience with Houdini
• Experience with fluid, soft or rigid body simulations
• Understand scripting and coding principles

Impact and Complexity

Our VFX teams are fundamental to bringing our worlds to life, bridging creative, technical and design fields they marry together art and science to allow us to deliver on pushing the boundaries of gameplay, art, and our ground-breaking proprietary technologies.

This role will be for an experienced VFX Artist to own and deliver sections of our projects, utilising all their experience, skills, and artistic eye. The result will be that they deliver visual effects that not only play and perform well, but meet the standard of high-quality visuals that our millions of players expect of a PlayStation Studio’s title.

Supervision

Senior Artists bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise, they are the pillars of our teams. They have no people management responsibilities. But they are the role models and voices of their teams, and it is encouraged that they lead by example, mentor, inspire and support more junior members of the team.

In taking charge of large areas of the projects, Senior Artists will be responsible for supervising quality and completion of supporting artists and partners.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

We encourage you to bring your best-unaltered self to work. Inclusivity is one of our studio values, which means we embrace different perspectives to fuel our creativity and we know that our games are stronger for it!

It is important to us that our teams are passionate about diversity and inclusion. They must understand that these words speak to people’s lived experiences that may differ to their own. We encourage our teams to educate themselves and show support and their commitment to DE&I (diversity, equity, and inclusion). As an example, some of our outreach activities include giving talks, mentoring, speaking at schools, running roundtables and much more.

We therefore welcome applications from all groups who are underrepresented in the games industry. We can offer training to upskill our team, so if you don’t feel you meet 100% of the job criteria, we still strongly encourage you to apply and look forward to hearing from you.

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Our roles can be flexible in terms of work location in the UK. We will consider the individual’s preference for hybrid, remote or onsite working. Unfortunately, we are not able to accommodate remote working outside of the UK.

However, if you wish to relocate to the UK and require sponsorship, we can support you with the visa process.

We have so many benefits, and we felt that if we listed them all out here it might look like we are bragging! What we can say is that we have you covered, from health and wellbeing, to finance and personal development, there is something there for everyone! If you would like to know more head to our benefits and perks page!