Senior Technical Artist

Description

BioWare is a division of EA which crafts high quality multiplatform role-playing, MMO and strategy games, focused on emotionally engaging, rich stories with unforgettable characters and vast worlds to discover. Since 1995, BioWare has created some of the world's most critically acclaimed titles and franchises, including Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. BioWare currently operates in Edmonton (Alberta, Canada), Montreal (Quebec, Canada) and Austin (Texas).

BioWare’s games have continually achieved critical and commercial success. All of our published titles are highly rated at www.gamerankings.com; in fact we have 6 games in the top 1% highest rated games of all time! Today BioWare has over 800 staff at its locations and continues to grow. In 2008, BioWare was acquired by Electronic Arts, a leading global interactive entertainment publisher. For more information on BioWare, visit www.bioware.com, or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/bioware . To join the millions of fans already registered with the BioWare community, go to http://social.bioware.com.

The Senior Technical Artist defines the production techniques used by artists, and ensures that the art team has all of the relevant tools and workflows they need to operate at peak efficiency. Develop the Art Direction into an optimal CG look, and ensure that all art content in all games is being built to withstand performance and memory requirements.

Driving artistic excellence through efficiency and innovation.

Job responsibilities:

Act as the technical art expert for the discipline. This includes handling all aspects of producing prototypes and samples, gathering requirements, directing resources, doing production work, analyzing results and communicating them as appropriate.

Assess, design and implement pipeline and workflow solutions; research tools and techniques to optimize current workflows and raise the quality bar of the studio and any external partners.

Organize and facilitate the documentation of discipline art tools and methodologies.

Identify gaps in Tech Art Departmental skillset and seek to strengthen either by recruitment or re-direction of existing TAs.

Identify training needs for existing TAs as well as mentoring of artists looking to graduate to the Tech Art discipline.

Work with shared tech team to influence overall graphics strategies; to share and leverage graphics processes, technologies and methodologies.

Support teams who are in production and who need help/support whilst taking into account the wider strategic needs of the studio.

Work with development teams to evaluate production issues and define solutions, whether they be knowledge/training, process, pipeline or tool related.

Work closely with dev leads to research and implement processes and methodologies that will take full advantage of hardware and software capabilities with an eye towards innovation.

Conduct reviews and advises senior production staff of any concerns and where necessary design effective solutions for potential problems ideally before they arise in production.