Character Outsourcing Artist

At DICE we love to push boundaries with creativity, passion, and the constant ambition to create something extraordinary. To do that we need the right people for the job. With the next challenge on the horizon we want to expand our Character Art team with an experienced Character Outsourcing Artist. 
Who you will work with
On a daily basis you will report to our Lead Character Artist and you will collaborate with Development Directors, Concept Artists and other Character Artists to ensure we provide the best support to both our internal and external artist and project needs.
As a studio we encourage career development, well-being and fun, which in the Character Outsourcing Artist translates to a high degree of creative ownership, a democratic decision-making process and plenty of growth opportunities both inside and outside of the team. We promote realistic and sustainable planning to provide a healthy work-life balance. We also organize activities such as workshops, life drawing sessions and regular team meals to bring the team closer together and foster a fun and inclusive workplace. 
What you will do
As a Character Outsourcing Artist at DICE we want you to help push the visual quality for character art, empower and be the glue between our external partners and our internal development team. This means that you will help document developing tools and pipeline, write briefs, review assets quality and provide artistic and technical feedback to our external partners, asset implementation, work closely with our internal character team and development directors to ensure we are on track with our planning and that we maintain our visual quality bar. 
 
You will also:


Review sample assets of externally created assets and communicate with Lead Character Artists in the team to ensure quality. 
Be responsible for the quality of external art production and make sure that our external partners have a steady backlog.
Handle communication with external partners and represent Character Artists in conversations and relay the info back to the appropriate teams.
Manage training and adapting our documentation for external partners, making sure they get what they need to work efficiently and are following our guidelines.
Build lasting and sustainable relationships with external partners.
Set an example for how we work with external development at the studio, by documenting and sharing best practices with other in-house teams and disciplines
Gather feedback from project teams regarding issues with external art and solve the issues together with the external partner.

Bonus points for:
Foundation knowledge of Shaders
Foundation knowledge of animation pipeline.
Understanding of game performance and technical budgets.
Familiarity with rigs, skinning, cloth and physics setup. 
Avid FPS player

 
Who you are
Regardless if your background is in games development studio or an outsourcing studio, what's most important is what you bring to the table and that you have a basic understanding of game development, what good looks like, documenting tools and workflows for AAA quality character creation.
You are also:
An individual with 3+ years of experience as a character artist in video games or outsourcing studios.
A person who actively contributes to a collaborative, transparent and learning culture within the team and who takes an active interest in improving the craft.
Selforganized and take great pride creating structure around you.
An excellent written, visual and verbal communicator, including coaching and mentoring, who is able to effectively work around time zone differences as well as potential language and cultural barriers. 
A people person who is passionate about building and maintaining a collaborative, transparent and learning culture together with our external partners and build bridges between our in-house artists and external partners.
Proficient with current generation industry-standard tools and workflows, such as Maya, Photoshop and the Substance suite. 
Experienced in sprint planning, scoping of work and creating and maintaining asset backlogs in software such as Shotgun. 
Able to balance multiple tasks and shifting priorities continuously and delegate work as necessary. 
Meticulously structured at setting and maintaining standards such as naming conventions and documentation.
 

Good for you to know
This is a permanent position and only applicants with a portfolio will be considered. As part of the application process we might ask you to perform a work assignment.
Even if your experience doesn’t perfectly match this job description we would love to hear from you and get to know you better. DICE is made up of people with different backgrounds and perspectives, so regardless of where you come from, we want you to apply if you want to become the next generation of DICErs.