Lighting Artist Contractor (6 months)

Key Responsibilities:

Lighting Setup and Adjustments:

Set up and maintain lighting across environments, character scenes, and cutscenes in Unity, ensuring they align with the game’s artistic vision and technical requirements.
Make real-time adjustments to lighting setups based on team feedback, optimizing performance while preserving visual fidelity.

Atmospheric Lighting and Mood Creation:

Work closely with the Head of Art & Animation and Environment Artists to develop atmospheric lighting that enhances the visuals within the game.
Use lighting creatively to reinforce gameplay, and player immersion across different game settings.

Collaborate with Art and Technical Teams:

Partner with environment artists and technical artists to ensure lighting works seamlessly with other visual components, enhancing cohesion and consistency in scenes.
Coordinate with technical art to balance visual quality and performance, ensuring lighting is efficient for real-time performance on targeted platforms.

Scene Optimisation and Debugging:

Identify and resolve technical and performance issues related to lighting, such as real-time shadows, global illumination, and post-processing, using profiling tools and techniques in Unity.
Collaborate with engineers to debug any lighting-related issues, ensuring assets meet performance and quality standards across devices.

Lighting Tool Usage and Shader Knowledge:

Leverage Unity's lighting tools within URP, such as light probes, reflection probes, and lighting volumes, to achieve realistic lighting effects that align with project goals.
Basic shader knowledge, with the ability to adjust or customize shaders in Unity as necessary to enhance visual effects related to lighting is a benefit.

Process Adherence and Detail Orientation:

Follow established workflows and best practices, avoiding ad-hoc solutions in favour of structured approaches that can be easily maintained and scaled.
Ensure all lighting assets and methods adhere to the project’s technical and aesthetic standards, with detailed documentation for future updates.

Lighting Polish and Review:

Continuously refine lighting elements through feedback cycles, ensuring consistency with the project’s vision and maintaining a high standard of visual quality.
Proactively share progress with the art team, being open to feedback and ready to iterate to align with broader art and design goals.

Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

2-3 years of experience in lighting for real-time environments, preferably within a game development setting, using Unity.
Demonstrated experience in lighting environments for interactive media, with a strong portfolio showcasing work on completed games or similar projects.
Proficiency in Unity’s lighting systems, including global illumination, lightmapping, post-processing, and environment lighting techniques.
Familiarity with profiling and optimisation techniques, ensuring real-time lighting runs efficiently across various hardware using URP.
Knowledge of basic shader adjustment in Unity for visual effects related to lighting.
A solid understanding of colour theory, composition, and visual storytelling.
Strong sense of mood and atmosphere creation through lighting, able to bring environments to life with attention to detail and thematic consistency.
Strong communication skills with the ability to work collaboratively and respond to feedback constructively.
Experience with other industry-standard software and tools, such as Photoshop or Substance for texture support related to lighting.
Understanding of URP in Unity, with experience in leveraging this for high-quality lighting.
Familiarity with procedural lighting tools or dynamic lighting systems.