Art

Lead 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 Lead 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.

This is a unique opportunity to be at the heart of crafting and bringing to life the next landmark PlayStation IP. You will have a meaningful role to play in creating, shaping, and directing the visual effects that excite millions and bring our worlds to life. The right artist has a passion for the craft, whilst building, mentoring, and developing a team of artists. This role will involve directing all aspects of producing striking high quality and optimised visual effects.

Scope of Work

• Accountable for delivery of high quality and performant VFX across our projects, to time and budget, all whilst amplifying our artistic value at scale.
• Establish Art Direction and Quality for all the artists on our projects and be responsible for our team’s and partner’s ability to implement and achieve that quality bar with clear, concise, and effective guidance and feedback.
• You will have an active role in evaluating and maintaining the VFX Art production schedule. Ensuring our scope, schedule and approach is scalable and flexible to meet our global development demands. Supervising and communicating project progress in your area.
• You are accountable for building a long-term strategy for your area, ensuring your team is aligned and feeding into the overall strategies.
• Drive regular and frequent review processes including setting up reviews for Art Leadership, and wider decision makers.
• Ensure an efficient production for our VFX Art being accountable for developing and maintaining the team’s processes, workflows, documentation, and confirming expectations are accurate, communicated and understood. You will continually optimise, automate, identify risks and issues across Pipelines and Workflows; proactively seeking and supervising the implementation of solutions.
• You will lead, mentor, and develop a specialised team. Handling their personal, and career growth. It is expected that you follow the established practises of line management in the Art Dept and at London Studio.
• Participate in setting wider Art department strategy, processes, best practises, and goals crafted to improve our teams year over year as a member of the dept’s management group.
• Collaborate with Art Management on project staffing, hiring, and onboarding. Anticipating skills and resource needs, leading your team recruitment, as well as acting as a consultant on wider department level gaps and solutions.
• Be directly involved in vendor relationships, ensuring stable long term mutually beneficial partnerships for our teams.

Essential Knowledge & Skills

• A creative at heart, the candidate must have experience in leadership and delivery of high-performance, high-quality VFX for AAA titles.
• 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
• Expert understanding of 3D packages (for example Maya, Max or Houdini)
• Extensive 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
• Exceptionally skilled with fluid, soft or rigid body simulations
• Understand scripting and coding principles
• Traditional 2D Skills

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.

We believe exceptional games and quality comes from a happy, productive, and creative team with clear objectives. That is why our Lead Artists are critical roles that are uniquely complex in that they are at the forefront of creative, development, and technology, but it’s about truly building an elite team internally and amongst our external partners.

Supervision

In this role you will be expected to build out the team, so we need someone who is a self-starter and a great teammate. We are hoping you are the type of Manager who leads, constantly wants to improve, and can motivate, empower, and steer a team.

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. We may be able to support remote working from a selection of other countries depending on location and the role you're applying to, so please reach out to see if that could be a possibility. 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!