Senior Environment Artist

Frontier Developments is seeking a Senior Environment Artist in Winnipeg, Canada. The role involves leading a small team to create high-quality modular environments for Tactical RPGs. Responsibilities include managing artists, creating in-game assets, collaborating on art direction, and ensuring quality output. Candidates should have strong 3D modeling skills, experience in game engines like Unity, and a solid understanding of landscape creation and PBR pipelines. Relocation assistance is available.
Founded in 2001, Complex Games has over 20 years' experience with an ambition of becoming a global leader in the development of innovative Tactical RPGs, including the recent success of turn-based PC strategy game Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters. The studio is based in Winnipeg, Canada, and employs 45 talented and passionate people including its founders and several other industry veterans. We‘re now growing the team and looking forward to making even more great games in the future as part of Frontier. Come join us!

WHAT’S THE ROLE

As the Senior/Lead Environment Artist, you will be leading a small team working on high quality modular environments in an upcoming Tactical RPGs. You will apply your experience and keen visual, spatial and design skills on a range of artistic styles. You will also need to be able to combine your understanding of visual style and how it relates to the natural world, to take even a loose sketch to an inspiring location in-game.

This is a great chance to work on diverse landscapes and environment content within a well-known IP.

This role is on-site in our Winnipeg Studio. We can offer a relocation package for the right candidate.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING
• Managing a small team of Artists, setting high standards, providing feedback, reviews, and edits to ensure that the team’s output aligns with standards.
• Creating and/or modifying in-game landscape assets within a given timeframe and budget, to final quality.
• Populating in-game landscapes with required contextual scenery assets, occasionally generating the required assets to specifications.
• Collaborating with the internal art team and external outsource suppliers, acting positively on Art Direction and feedback, to complete the work to a high quality and required art style.
• Working closely with Programmers to create the systems and parameters for the game assets.
• Interpreting 2D concept art, design requirements and visual reference into high quality 3D landscapes that capture the spirit of the concept as well as the technical dimensions.
• Understanding and accommodating the context of the landscape - how it needs to be set up and its gameplay potential.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING
• A team player who works collaboratively, gives and receives feedback and provides guidance to multiple disciples within the studio.
• Experience managing and mentoring a team.
• Ability to solve complex problems and implement solutions.
• Experience of working within game engines, preferably Unity.
• Ability to work within an established art style.
• Strong 3D modelling skills, preferably in Maya and zBrush.
• Strong Substance Designer/Painter and Photoshop texturing skills, targeting physically based rendering.
• Understanding of the entire game landscape creation pipeline: height field generation, texture masks creation, layered material set up, setting up and exporting to game.
• Experience with PBR pipeline and real-time engines.
• Great understanding of proportion, scale, perspective, lighting and colour.
• Understanding of clean hierarchy structure, and how to achieve that in an efficient manner.
• A keen eye for spinning narrative and life into an environment.
• Understanding of best working practices in terms of pipeline flow and game optimisation.

BONUS IF YOU HAVE
• An Art degree or relevant game art course.
• An adaptable attitude to working across a breadth of art styles, from high-detail realism to more cartoon stylisation.
• Unity experience on PC & Console.
• Experience working with both hard and soft environment objects and landscapes
• Ability to synthesize a wide range of assets and shape them into an artistic whole.
• Experience leading a team of environment artists toward a common goal.

WHAT WE CAN OFFER YOU

You'll work directly with a friendly and experienced team that is striving to push the envelope in the tactical RPG space by creating challenging new worlds with compelling cinematic narratives.

We provide a competitive salary, our Frontier annual bonus scheme and an extended health and benefits plan.

We welcome and encourage applications from qualified candidates regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, religion or belief.