Senior Technical Artist (Houdini)

What we need:

Smilegate Barcelona is looking for an experienced and talented Houdini Technical Artist, to join our growing team of developers. We're looking for an individual who knows how to create tools, assets, and pipelines in Houdini that integrate well with Unreal Engine for the next generation game platforms. 

We are looking for someone with:

• A passion for art and making games.
• A proactive attitude that actively seeks out inefficiencies and problems in existing content pipelines and identify potential solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to prototype in engine, and are capable of working quickly in the prototyping phase and then delivering final, quality code that can be leveraged by others.

What the role involves:

• Work daily with production, art and design teams to design, create, and implement production ready world building solutions within Houdini for export to Unreal Engine .
• Work with design and art to find areas for improvement and help prototype or implement solutions.
• Explore novel ways to populate and annotate game levels, allowing artists and designers to have a wider positive impact on the look and design without sacrificing creative control over their craft.
• Create new or modify existing world building methods to help speed up the iteration times of the Design and Art teams.
• Work to improve the tools artists use outside of the game engine, such as Substance Designer/Painter, 3ds Max, Maya, ZBrush, etc.
• Assist programmers and designers in researching and developing new game features.
• Help standardize the workflow and pipelines for asset creation.
• Drive and maintain performance goals and optimizations in tool development.

Role requirements:

• 2+ years developing tools and assets in Houdini for the game industry with one shipped title.
• 4+ years of experience developing stable and useful tools for asset development support, with two shipped titles.
• Thorough knowledge of Houdini asset and SOP-based tool development (including VEX and Python) for games, and Houdini Engine.
• Strong understanding of the performance implications of open world development on consoles and PCs.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to effectively balance the needs of game design, art and programming.
• A web portfolio that demonstrates usable game development and Houdini tools.
• Samples, demonstrations, or documentation of tools pipelines developed to overcome development challenges.

Desirable

• Be able to work comfortably with common scripting languages (MAXScript, MEL script, Python, etc.)
• Experience with shading language (HLSL/CG/etc.)
• Experience using 3ds Max, Maya, and Substance Designer or Painter.