Principal Character Concept Artist

Treyarch is looking for an experienced, self-driven, highly imaginative, and versatile Principal Character Concept Artist to join our in-house team in Los Angeles or Vancouver. You will be responsible for driving the look and feel of exciting characters, outfits, weapons, and gear designs using your creativity, traditional and digital illustration skills, 3D, and generative AI tools. This role is ideal for someone bursting with ideas and that enjoys leading the creative vision of character designs and collaborating with multiple stakeholder groups.

What you’ll do…

• Brainstorm with stakeholders on imaginative innovative ideas for characters, weapons, and gear designs.

• Research and develop new exciting visual treatments using 2D, 3D, motion, and generative AI tools.

• Review the team’s character designs before they move into production and ensure they meet our projects’ quality, consistency, attitude, and style standards.

• Create documentation that guides internal and external content character content creation.

• Provide art direction and feedback to the team to push visuals further and problem solve.

• Incorporate 3D problem solving into your character design process, including working with others’ models to modify, render, and composite them to communicate the best solutions.

• Create high quality concept art for characters – ranging from loose exploration sketches all the way to fully rendered designs.

• Design alternate variants of existing characters as well as creating new ones that span across multiple genres.

• Use generative AI tools to enhance your production capabilities.

• Work closely with art directors, artists, animators, and designers on the design and function of characters.

• Confidently self-manage timelines, workloads, and regularly communicate with stakeholders and implement their feedback.

To succeed you should have…

• 7+ years of demonstrated experience in the games or film industry, designing characters, costumes, weapons, and gear for commercial titles.

• Exceptional creativity in transforming business needs into compelling character designs and innovative concepts.

• Advanced skills in digital photo manipulation, image clean-up, and compositing elements to create exciting visuals.

• Experienced background in traditional art skills, understanding fundamentals like anatomy, proportion, scale, value, and color theory.

• Advanced sketching abilities as well as rendering, graphic design, and iconography.

• Extensive understanding of material surfaces and the ability to communicate them visually.

• Excellent understanding of mechanical function and purpose.

• Deeply knowledgeable in character costume and fashion design across various eras.

• An understanding of the relevance of art to gameplay.

• Mastery of Adobe Creative Suite including Photoshop.

• Experienced in using 3D applications to modify, pose, and render characters.

• Work samples showing knowledge of generative AI tools like, Stable Diffusion, Vizcom, Dall-E, or equivalent.

• An understanding of which art techniques to employ to deliver character art deliverables on time while communicating what is needed to the team, with an excellent attention to design, detail, form, and function.

• Self-managing and able to identify and meet deadlines and goals.

• Fast and organized at researching and reference gathering.

• A collaborative and team player approach, being able to contribute ideas, take direction, and react to stakeholder feedback.

• Ability to learn new tools quickly and effectively.

• A robust online portfolio showcasing conceptual thinking, meticulous execution, and versatility in creating diverse character designs across multiple themes and styles.

• Willingness to complete a test if requested.

We’d love it if you also have...

• An understanding and familiarity with Treyarch lore, game history, Call of Duty, and design themes.

• Expertise in designing weapons for FPS games.

• A passion for video games, music, movies, graphic novels, and other elements of pop culture.

• Knowledge in common 3D software such as Maya, Modo, 3ds, or sketch up to facilitate concept creation.

• Knowledge of general military application, history, and authenticity.

• Knowledge and passion for weapons and vehicles.

We love hearing from anyone who is enthusiastic about changing the games industry. Not sure you meet all qualifications? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! At Activision Blizzard, we are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply.

The videogame industry and therefore our business is fast-paced and will continue to evolve. As such, the duties and responsibilities of this role may be changed as directed by the Company at any time to promote and support our business and relationships with industry partners.

About Treyarch

Founded in 1996, Treyarch is a videogame studio whose purpose is to create awesome games for the world to enjoy. With this purpose in mind, we crafted the award winning Call of Duty: Black Ops series and pioneered the fan favorite Zombies mode.

At Treyarch, we empower the team to be individually driven to innovate on our games, processes, and culture. How we do things is just as important as what we do.

Studio culture and development, we believe it’s a team effort and that collaboration and hearing one another is key. Every day we face the large and small challenges together and every voice matters.

These values guide us in our mission to create moments that matter. Both to the players and to us, the creators. In an era where triumphs and defeats are readily shared, seeing players engage with our creations gives us great pride. Come help us create that next moment.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, or any other basis protected by applicable law, and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable assistance to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. If you are a disabled individual requiring an accommodation to apply for an open position, please email your request to accommodationrequests@activisionblizzard.com. General employment questions cannot be accepted or processed here. Thank you for your interest.

To learn more about our studio, please visit us at www.treyarch.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/treyarch, and @treyarch on Twitter.

PS, we’ve also got some pretty amazing office perks and benefits, like 20 vacation days and 16 holidays, 10 weeks of family leave, free lunches and snacks at our office, comprehensive healthcare, and more! Check out all the details here for more information: https://www.benefitsforeveryworld.com/

Rewards

We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for ‘Every World’ - we’ve got our employees covered! Subject to eligibility requirements, the Company offers comprehensive benefits including:

• Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance;

• 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching;

• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave;

• Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others;

• If the Company requires that you move geographic locations for the job, then you may also be eligible for relocation assistance.

Eligibility to participate in these benefits may vary for part time and temporary full-time employees and interns with the Company. You can learn more by visiting https://www.benefitsforeveryworld.com/.

In the U.S., the standard base pay range for this role is $134,000.00 - $247,900.00 Annual. These values reflect the expected base pay range of new hires across all U.S. locations. Ultimately, your specific range and offer will be based on several factors, including relevant experience, performance, and work location. Your Talent Professional can share this role’s range details for your local geography during the hiring process. In addition to a competitive base pay, employees in this role may be eligible for incentive compensation. Incentive compensation is not guaranteed. While we strive to provide competitive offers to successful candidates, new hire compensation is negotiable.