Art Outsourcing Manager

The Outsource Manager is responsible for facilitating the external creation of high quality content, while maintaining consistency of all external art development as set out by project art direction. Your focus may span across a number of art sub-disciplines including Character, Cinematics, Concept, Environment, Prop, Technical, Vehicle, Animation, and Weapons.

The role requires a good knowledge and understanding of art pipelines and production methods complimented with a proficient ability in coordinating reviews, feedback, and tracking of art deliveries and progress.

You will manage consistency in the forecasting, and planning of deliverables with both internal and external teams, assist in the organisation and review process of external assets, and demonstrate a mix of excellent communication and leadership skills between the internal and external teams. Although not essential, if you understand the basic principles of artwork creation this is beneficial.

As an Outsource Manager you also understand the various constraints and challenges during game development, including performance, memory and frame budgets, production schedules, and design requirements.

• Work closely with the Art Director to understand and communicate the expectations for visual quality of in-game art with external teams.
• Align closely with the Art Manager and Leads to keep quality and style consistent across all outsourced art.
• Coordinate with teams to author briefs, assets packs, and documentation for external teams.
• Coordinate with both the internal and external art teams to facilitate the smooth movement of art assets and feedback, while ensuring on-time deliverables to required quality and technical specifications.
• Work with game teams to set benchmarks for efficiency and end product quality.
• Maintain strong working relationships with external teams.
• Works with Art Director and Art Manager to identify, and schedule, assets for external development.
• Help set up and document art pipelines, further develop best practices, and continually optimise workflows.
• Coordinates the production of documentation and briefs for external teams.
• Works with the internal Concept team to ensure concepts are at the right level of quality/detail for briefing external teams.
• Help organise and prepare asset packs for our external teams.
• Organise and prepare outsourced assets for art reviews with the Art leaders.
• Ensure art assets are made available to the internal art team members, and feedback is made available to the external art team members.
• Participates in project planning and maintain a clear and consistent schedule in conjunction with Production and Art Manager.

• Experience as an Artist, Art Producer, Art Manager or equivalent is desired.
• Strong Excel skills and ability to create tracking and analysis sheets.
• Excellent scheduling, resource allocation and issue solving abilities.
• Familiarity working with industry standard task tracking software such as Shotgrid and Jira.
• Leadership and management experience; ideally in an external capacity.
• Completed work on several published AAA titles.
• Excellent spoken, written and diagrammatic communication skills. Fully capable of explaining complex instructions to an external team.
• Ability to work with detailed concept art or reference art/materials when providing support to external teams.
• Understanding of game art principles and creation processes; for example, high resolution sculpting, UV layout, texturing, and shaders.
• Capable in identifying risks and issues within any asset creation pipeline (internal and external) and can proactively seek and implement solutions.
• Willingness to travel when necessary.

Splash Damage is an equal opportunity employer. We believe our teams create better work when they have a range of perspectives to draw from, and we are committed to creating an inclusive working environment that celebrates diversity.