Technical Character Artist

Yellow Brick Games is seeking a Technical Character Artist to put in place, support and elevate our character production workflows. In this role, you’ll work closely with character artists, technical artists and programmers to ensure our character assets meet quality and performance standards. You’ll be responsible for building tools, automating processes, and helping bridge the gap between asset creation and engine integration in Unreal Engine.

Yellow Brick Games is based in Quebec City, Canada, and we are open to discuss remote-work situations. We are committed to diversity and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to place of origin, age, status, religious beliefs, personal orientations, or physical condition.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the character art team to help define visual benchmarks, contribute to look development, and establish what “good” looks like for characters in-game.
• Bridge the gap between character artists and game designers to facilitate the creation of complex enemies interactions with our systems.
• Design and maintain character asset pipelines to streamline integration into Unreal Engine.
• Collaborate with character artists to ensure assets meet technical standards and engine constraints.
• Profile and optimize character assets for memory usage, shader complexity, and rendering performance.
• Assist with shader setup, material functions, and character-specific visual effects.
• Develop tools and scripts to automate repetitive tasks and accelerate asset iteration.
• Work with programmers and artists to troubleshoot character-related issues in production builds.
• Help document best practices and serve as a technical resource for the character team.

Requirements

• Solid experience as a Technical Character Artist or similar role, with a focus on character asset workflows.
• Strong knowledge of Unreal Engine and its character-related systems (materials, components, Mutable, animation integration, etc.).
• Experience with content optimization for real-time environments.
• Proficiency in tool scripting (e.g., Python, Blueprint, or MEL/PyMEL) for DCCs like Maya, Houdini, etc.
• Familiarity with material creation and optimization in Unreal Engine.
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to technical detail.
• Clear communication skills and an ability to collaborate effectively with interdisciplinary teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with, maintaining and optimizing strand-base fur systems (e.g., Unreal Groom or third-party solutions like Ornatrix or Xgen) for real-time characters.
• Experience with dynamic materials (e.g., for character customization or condition-based shaders).
• Knowledge of cloth systems such as Chaos Cloth.
• Understanding of Niagara or other visual effects tools for character-related VFX.
• Knowledge of performance profiling tools in Unreal Engine.
• Strong knowledge of Unreal Engine render pipeline (Nanite, Lumen, VSM, etc.)