Senior Environment Artist - EA SPORTS

About the Organization:  EA is one of the most iconic brands in entertainment with nearly 30 years of innovation, passion, and connection of millions of players across the globe to their favorite video games IP. We are assembling a team with the purpose of constructing a novel and immersive experience. This is your opportunity to join this new team that will shape the future of interactive entertainment.

About our team:  We are starting a new team composed of a mixture of veterans of EA/EA SPORTS and new talent from across industries. With some of the most valuable IP in the world, and the resources EA has to offer, we have access to the capabilities needed to deliver amazing new experiences for an expanded audience of players worldwide.

About the role:  

Building massive environments, populating them with buildings, roads, trees and props - the Worlds team has the ultimate goal of creating fun, interactive and exciting worlds for our players to experience. As a Senior Environment Artist you will work with both internal and external teams of the Worlds/Environments domain, to achieve diverse and engaging worlds and gameplay levels for our players. You will collaborate closely with Art Direction and EA SPORTS FC Leads, to help develop both the visual and gameplay experiences – according to the goals of each.

Your Responsibilities:

• Creating high-quality benchmark content, from individual assets to entire levels, sets, or stadiums/arenas.
• Set dress locations, conveying depth and storytelling in the way assets are composed – going beyond the immediate needs of game design.
• Deconstruct concept art, reference imagery, and style guides into efficient asset lists, taking into account opportunities for reuse and modular construction.
• Run the entire level building process, from initial grey-block rapid layout, through to final assets.
• Breakdown tasks, assemble reference material, write briefs, and oversee the work of internal and external artists.
• Explore, recommend and implement new techniques, tools, and workflows, that improve quality and efficiency.
• Maintain team best practices.
• Mentor junior/intermediate artists.

Your Qualifications:  

• 6 or more years of production experience with asset creation, and overseeing entire levels.
• You have expert knowledge of Maya, Max, or similar 3D modeling software.
• Exceptional asset creation abilities (hard surface, architecture and/or organic assets)
• Experience breaking down complex scenes into efficient asset sets and components.
• Experienced working methodically, from initial grey-block through to final assets, iterating with low-fidelity content to determine the optimal approach, before building final assets.
• A strong sense of proportion, scene composition, and lighting.
• Convey a sense of ‘story’ through scene composition and set dressing – either to support, or enhance to the game design.
• Experienced in managing and directing a small subset of artists in delivering Environments content to final quality.
• Well versed in assessing scope, making recommendations, providing solid estimates, and delivering on time and to quality
• Experience working with content-driven game engines (e.g. Unreal, Frostbite, Unity).
• Experience collaborating with designers, engineers, and tech artists to evolve workflows, pipelines, and to problem-solve.
• High fidelity modeling skills, along with ability to paint photorealistic surfaces using industry-standard physically-based 3D paint software (ideally Substance Painter).
• Experience with photogrammetry, ZBrush and Substance Designer is a plus.
• Experience working with outsource vendors is a plus.