Technical Level Artist

Job Description:

We are looking for a Technical Level Artist to work across a range of Unreal Engine projects. The role covers both environment asset creation and level art, from modelling and preparing assets through to building, dressing, lighting, and optimising levels.

This is a hands-on role for an artist with strong Unreal Engine experience who is comfortable working across the environment art pipeline. This includes modelling, UVs, materials, asset implementation, level composition, set dressing, lighting, optimisation, and final visual polish.

A strong understanding of real-time performance is important. The role will involve identifying and solving technical and visual issues within Unreal Engine, with a particular focus on GPU, CPU, memory, rendering, and streaming performance across PC and mobile platforms.

This is a full-time contract position, with a strong preference for candidates who can work on-site from our Auckland office. For the right candidate, we may be able to support remote work within New Zealand. Please note, you must have the right to work in New Zealand to be eligible for this position.

We highly value diversity. Regardless of disability, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or any other aspect of your culture or identity, you have an important role to play in our team.

Contract Rate: NZD $40 – $60 / hr

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and polish high-quality game environments in Unreal Engine from blockout through to final-quality level art.
• Create high-quality, game-ready environment assets.
• Level asset placement, environment composition, set dressing and visual polish.
• Use Unreal Engine profiling and debugging tools to identify and resolve environment performance bottlenecks.
• Profile and troubleshoot GPU, CPU, memory and rendering performance issues, optimising levels and environment content for PC and mobile hardware.
• Optimise draw calls, shader complexity, overdraw, visibility, culling, level streaming and runtime asset usage.
• Implement and optimise World Partition and other level streaming workflows.
• Optimise Static Meshes, LODs, collision, materials, textures and other environment assets.
• Identify and resolve technical art issues affecting level quality or performance.
• Contribute to art pipelines, technical standards and best practices.

Job Requirements:

• 2+ years of professional experience as a Level Artist, Environment Artist, Technical Artist, or similar role.
• Strong professional experience using Unreal Engine in game development.
• Strong experience creating and polishing game environments in Unreal Engine.
• Strong understanding of level art, environment composition, set dressing and visual storytelling.
• Proven ability to take environments from blockout through to final-quality level art.
• Strong understanding of Unreal Engine performance and optimisation.
• Experience profiling and optimising GPU, CPU, memory and rendering performance.
• Strong understanding of draw calls, shader complexity, overdraw, visibility, culling and level streaming.
• Experience with World Partition and streaming workflows.
• Experience with material and shader optimisation.
• Understanding of lighting and shadow performance.
• Understanding of PC versus mobile performance limitations and scalability requirements.
• Ability to troubleshoot technical art and performance issues within Unreal Engine.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate within multidisciplinary teams.
• Self-driven, organised and capable of independently managing workload.

Additional Valuable Skills:

• Chinese language proficiency. As we work closely with international teams, Chinese language proficiency is very valuable.

About Prismatic Studios:

Prismatic Studios is an Unreal Engine specialist Co-Development Studio and Technical Consultancy based in Auckland, New Zealand. We provide Technical Consultation, Co-Development, and Full Development services for Unreal Engine projects.

We are an Unreal Gold Service Partner and specialise in providing Unreal Engine development services to the region and abroad.