Lead Technical Artist

On a day-to-day basis, this role will:

• Support the wellbeing of your team as a priority
• Foster the career development of your team in skills and behaviours for all levels of technical artist under your management.
• Build a comprehensive understanding of in-house tools, technical art codebase, engine and workflows.
• Strategically plan and deliver professional quality tools and scripts for art packages and game engine.
• Lead by example in collaborating with key pipeline stakeholders in all departments of the Total War team.
• Communicate clearly the status of work from the tech art team to stakeholders consistently.
• Motivate the team to be productive and prioritise work accordingly.
• Follow up task work blocking team progress to ensure consistent delivery of commitments.
• Attend the pipeline standups and tech art team meetings
• Own and organise documentation of the teams' progress to onboard artists and contractors to tools and pipelines your team manages.
• Set coding and quality standards of work and encourage the same in others.
• Support artists in pipeline issues and rapid prototyping and keep art teams productive.
• Work with Technical Art director and project directors to keep aligned on franchise priorities for your area.
• You will be involved in the quarterly planning process, and you will have the opportunity to solve development productivity problems and make a real difference for content creators.

Knowledge, Skill and Experience 

Essential:

• Has experience writing code in any language. (python/C#/C++)
• Extensive experience of shader creation HLSL and/or node-based.
• Experience in designing pipelines for games that have been released.
• Working knowledge of 3d content creation package(s) e.g. 3dsmax, Maya, Blender.
• Excellent problem-solving skills.
• Team focused with strong communication skills.
• Be the technical expertise point of contact to streamline communication between programmers and artists.
• Positive attitude and desire to collaborate.
• Experience as a Lead technical artist in at least 1 game development cycle to title release
• Profiling tools experience such as render doc/ PIX
• Experience in multi-platform shader development
• Investigate and champion new techniques that push visual innovation within considerations of art direction and game engine parameters.

Desirable:

• Procedural content creation / Houdini knowledge.
• Working knowledge of Substance Designer/Painter.
• Having completed game jams, tools and/or personal projects.
• Art background or training.