Senior Environment Technical Artist - EA SPORTS Technology
EA SPORTS is one of the leading sports entertainment brands in the world, with top-selling videogame franchises, award-winning interactive technology, fan programs, and cross-platform digital experiences. EA SPORTS creates connected experiences that ignite the emotion of sport through industry-leading sports video games, including Madden NFL football, FIFA soccer, NHL® hockey, NBA LIVE basketball, and EA SPORTS UFC.
EA SPORTS Tech provides specialized technology teams working on modern character motion, content pipelines and workflows, machine learning, game security, dev ops, long lead feature and technology development for all EA SPORTS titles, and improves Frostbite engine workflows and solutions for all in partnership with engineers. As part of EA SPORTS Tech, the Technical Art Team helps push visual boundaries and experiences for our players. We invest in future technologies, shared tooling, and production workflows. We combine creativity and imagination with technical expertise. We are a diverse group that encourages team members to bring their unique perspectives and expertise to work every day.
This team works onsite 3 days/week in our Burnaby studio. This is a 12-month contract to start with the possibility of longer term employment.
Your Responsibilities
As a Senior Environment Artist, you will collaborate closely with Art and Craft Directors, Tech Artists, and Tech Art Directors to create content for a wide variety of stadiums and arenas, from realistic to futuristic to fantasy.
- Create high-quality benchmark geometry, materials, and shaders.
- Create photorealistic tiling and atlas materials following established PBR standards and layered materials/shaders.
- Create proof-of-concept layouts to inform game systems, set dressing, and composition.
- Deconstruct concept art, reference imagery, and style guides into efficient asset lists, identifying opportunities for modular construction and asset reuse.
- Create high-fidelity architectural and environmental content from greybox through final production assets.
- Collaborate with Lighting, Design, Engineering, and Technical Art to implement production solutions and solve content challenges.
- Explore and evolve techniques, and workflows that improve quality and efficiency.
- Maintain and contribute to best practices.
Your Qualifications
- 5+ years of production experience creating environment assets and entire levels
- Expert knowledge of Maya (preferably) or similar 3D software.
- Exceptional asset creation abilities, particularly architectural and structural content.
- Experience working from greybox to final assets, using low-fidelity content to validate approaches before production.
- Strong understanding of proportion, composition, lighting, and modular construction.
- Ability to assess scope, provide estimates, and deliver high-quality work on schedule.
- Extensive experience with complex game engines such as Unreal, Frostbite, or Unity.
- Experience actively collaborating with Designers, Engineers, and Technical Artists.
- Advanced high-fidelity modeling skills.
- Ability to create photorealistic materials using industry-standard tools such as Substance Painter and Substance Designer, combining photographic, scanned, and procedural elements.
- Strong technical skills, with demonstrable understanding of memory and GPU budgets, and best practices for creating high quality performant content.
- Experience working with outsource vendors is a plus.
- Experience creating game engine shader graphs is a plus.
Portfolio Requirements
- Examples of assets and environments owned from start to finish.
- Work demonstrating composition, architectural construction, and material creation, including believable wear and tear, and aging.
- High-fidelity modeled assets painted using tools such as Substance Painter.
- Photorealistic tiling materials created with Substance Designer.
- In-engine layered materials combining tiling textures, detail overlays, and masked elements.