Senior Character LookDev Artist - F/M/NB

Role Summary

• Responsibilities: Create and maintain high-quality character shaders and material systems, ensuring characters achieve the required visual quality, realism, and performance in-game.

• Team composition: Character Shader Artists working closely with Character Artists, Lead/Principal Character Artists, Character Art Director, and Technical Artists.

• Team work: Primarily with the Character Art team, while collaborating closely with Technical Art, Rendering/Graphics Engineering, VFX, Lighting, and Art Direction.

We are looking for a Senior Character LookDev Artist to develop and maintain the shaders and material solutions that bring our characters and creatures to life in-game. You will work closely with Character Artists and Technical Artists to translate high-quality character assets into performant, visually consistent, and production-ready game assets.

Core Mandate (3 main missions)

• Develop and maintain character shaders and material systems for skin, eyes, hair, cloth, leather, metal, wet materials, translucent materials, and other character-specific surfaces.

• Push character visual quality and realism by developing advanced material solutions, supporting look development, and translating offline/reference-quality looks into real-time game rendering.

• Ensure performance, scalability, and consistency of character shaders across target platforms while establishing reusable workflows, documentation, and best practices for the character art team.

Success Criteria (What are we expecting from this person in the next months)

• Deliver production-ready character shaders and material solutions that meet the project’s visual quality and technical requirements.

• Establish or improve a consistent character material/shader pipeline, reducing iteration time between Character Artists, Lookdev, Lighting, and Technical Art.

• Successfully optimize shaders and materials to meet performance budgets without compromising the required visual quality.

• Provide strong technical support to Character Artists and become a go-to expert for character materials, shaders, and real-time rendering.

• Identify technical limitations and propose new shader/material solutions that improve the overall character pipeline.

Key information

• Contractor/Freelance contract via Deel

• Availability: ASAP (if available later, do not hesitate to apply!)

• Location: Full remote possible (Europe only)

  Few links about us

• Our website: https://taragaming.com/

• We released the first trailer: https://tinyurl.com/yd9k7fa8

• Life as a Programmer at Tara Gaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wk31RUwGAo

• Life as an Artist at Tara Gaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_n9FGuugvk

• A short article about us: https://gamesbeat.com/the-age-of-bhaarat-aims-to-be-the-black-myth-wukong-moment-for-triple-a-fans-in-india-exclusive-interviews/

• Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3323210/The_Age_of_Bhaarat/?beta=0

Hard skills

• Mandatory

  • Strong understanding of real-time rendering and physically based rendering (PBR).

  • Proven professional experience creating character shaders/materials for AAA or high-quality games.

  • Strong knowledge of shader development and material graphs in a modern game engine such as Unreal Engine.

  • Strong understanding of PBR, lighting, color spaces, texture maps, normals, roughness, metallic, subsurface scattering, and material response.

  • Experience developing character-specific materials such as skin, eyes, hair, cloth, and complex layered materials.

  • Strong understanding of shader optimization and real-time performance, including shader complexity, instruction count, texture sampling, memory usage, and platform constraints.

  • Ability to work closely with Character Artists and Technical Artists and translate artistic requirements into technical shader solutions.

  • Strong troubleshooting and debugging skills for visual and technical rendering issues.

  • Knowledge of hair/fur rendering and grooming-related shaders.

  • Experience with Substance 3D Designer / Painter and procedural material workflows.

  • Experience with subsurface scattering, transmission, anisotropy, iridescence, clear coat, and layered materials.

• Nice to have

  • Experience with HLSL / GLSL or writing custom shader code.

  • Experience with Unreal Engine custom nodes, material functions, and shader development.

  • Experience with GPU profiling and rendering/debugging tools.

  • Experience working with custom rendering pipelines or proprietary AAA engines.

  • Python or other scripting experience for pipeline/tools development.

  • Understanding of next-generation rendering technologies such as Nanite, Lumen, virtual texturing, ray tracing, or similar technologies.

1. First conversation (20 min) by video call with Arthur (Recruiter): To learn more about your experience, your expectations and Tara Gaming/Novaquark

2. Hiring Manager interview (1 hour) with Vincent (Associate Art Director (Characters), Mohamed (Lead Character Artist) et Radu (Lead Tech Artist): To meet your future manager and to go deeper in our current context

Throughout the entire recruitment process, Arthur will ensure follow-up and coordination. Do not hesitate to send your portfolio in addition to your CV to showcase your creations!