Lead Technical Artist - Remote. in Gateshead

Company Description

People Can Fly is one of the leading independent AAA games development studios with an international team of hundreds of talented individuals working from offices located in Poland, UK, US, and Canada, and from all over the world thanks to our remote work programs. Founded in 2002, we made our mark on the shooter genre with titles such as Painkiller, Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment, and Outriders. We are one of the most experienced Unreal Engine studios in the industry and we are expanding it with in-house solutions called PCF Framework. Our creative teams are currently working on several exciting titles: Gemini is our new project being developed with Square Enix; Bifrost, Victoria and Dagger are projects we’re growing in the self-publishing model. We also have one project in the concept phase - Red; as well as two projects in VR technology - Green Hell VR and Thunder - a new project based on one of the IPs from the Group's portfolio. With over 20 years of experience, PCF sets out to explore new horizons. We aim to combine our expertise with creativity of the best and most forward-thinking talents in the industry to work together on the new generation of action games for the global gaming community. If you decide to accompany us on this journey, you’ll have a chance to perfect your craft and expand your knowledge, working alongside leaders in the industry on bringing a brand-new unique experience to the players worldwide. Project Victoria is a yet unannounced AAA action-adventure game developed by our North American team supported by PCF's European studios.

Job Description

To act as a bridge between the artists and programmers to make sure we end with visually pleasing content that works on target platforms. Overcome the technical difficulties in art and feature creation.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team and foster an engaging atmosphere within their team to achieve best possible result for the project and personal growth of team members.
• Maintain artistic direction and quality.
• Making final materials for characters, environment assets, and effects, also supports existing material systems.
• Content creation-mock up features in external programs or tweak shader code, experiment with features.
• To tweak assets by using modeling and texturing skills.
• Help improve and refine shader, texture, lighting quality.
• Collaborate on the artistic vision and style with the Art Director, as well as maintaining the quality standards across the entire development pipeline.
• Maintain the production and software pipeline and meet deadlines.
• Develop powerful and efficient workflows for the Art team.
• Research and implement new techniques and procedures to improve game asset quality.
• Explore and help develop new technologies for integration into the asset pipeline.
• Working with artists and programmers to create pipelines and processes that would both facilitate visual quality and building 3D assets efficiently.
• Work closely with the production team on tasks assignment and schedule to meet deadlines, also ensuring healthy work-life balance by setting clear expectations and scope of work.
• Supervision of bug fixing and describing R&D case studies in knowledge base.
• Provide day-to-day feedback improvement to visual quality.
• Working with the team to find solutions and creatively solve problems.
• Knowledge sharing and mentoring peers.
• Collaborate with Tech Art and drive R&D initiatives, to explore new techniques and implement improvements to pipelines and workflows.
• Collaborates and communicates effectively across departments with other Leads, Directors, and project stakeholders to ensure efficiency and minimize miscommunication.
• Identify and resolve pipeline issues without supervision.
• Use diagnostic tools to examine the current content and identify areas for improvement as well as develop the tools.
• Analyze and improve art asset inefficiencies to optimize console and PC performance.
• Work with programmers and artists to optimize content creation.
• Work with programmers on developing new features and workflows.
• Conduct consistent performance and compensation reviews of staff members.
• Conduct recruitment projects with HR collaboration.
• Conduct onboarding to new hires.