Technical Level Architect

Description

The Technical Level Architect position at 2K Marin is a content-creation job that combines the skills of environment modeler, level artist and tech artist together in a hybrid role. This person reports to the Environment Art Director. This artist will not be assigned to a single shipping level, but will have his/her duties split in two ways -

• Floating Level Architect – The Tech. Level Architect will be assigned specific areas of different levels to help build/polish on an as-needed basis as support for other Level Architects who need extra attention on their levels

• Environment Technical Artist – The Tech. Level Architect will help with technical aspects of shipping all of our levels with Unreal on the console by analyzing performance, construction methodology, evaluating middleware solutions, and helping to define workflows for the other Level Architects on the team.


Technical Level Architect Job Responsibilities

• Build, decorate, light and polish focused level content using Unreal
- Needs to be comfortable collaborating with a Level Designer for this
- Will usually be working in someone else’s level doing focused “hit list” types of level work

• Analyze performance of levels on the console for both Xbox 360 and PS3

• Create presentations for Level Architect team describing best practices for things like:
- Framerate
- Memory optimization
- Streaming setup
- Post-processing implementation
- Modular asset construction

• Tackle specific aesthetic or technical problems related to level art as defined by Environment Art Director

• Work with local and outsourced modeling team to define models being built for levels

• Work with Environment Art Director on figuring out how to achieve desired look/feel with levels
- Palette control
- Lighting
- Dynamic environment considerations (damage, lighting changes, physics, etc)
- Object density

• Evaluate tools and workflows that Level Architects use during construction
- Lighting engines
- BSP vs staticmesh
- Foliage solutions