Character Artist

Company Overview

Cloud Imperium Games is a leading game development company known for its innovative and immersive gaming experiences. Founded in 2012 by renowned game developer Chris Roberts, CIG is one of the largest global independent studios with over 1,000 employees. The company is dedicated to creating high-quality games that captivate players worldwide, including Star Citizen and Squadron 42. CIG values thinking outside the box, encouraging creativity, and developing ground-breaking technology to raise the bar for the gaming industry. The company is crowdfunded with a dedicated and enthusiastic community of backers.

Responsibilities

• Develop and create high-quality characters, clothing, hair, armor, and supporting props from concept through final in-game implementation.
• Master and help maintain the visual style, artistic direction, and AAA quality bar of the characters, creatures, and aliens within the vast universe of Star Citizen.
• Take ownership of complex and hero character assets, artistically interpreting concepts and pushing designs when needed while remaining consistent with the established visual direction.
• Create stunning, believable art that captures the overall filmic quality and realism of the Star Citizen universe.
• Work closely with the Character Art Lead, Art Director, Technical Art and other disciplines to ensure characters meet both artistic and technical expectations.
• Contribute to establishing visual benchmarks and maintaining quality standards throughout the character production pipeline.
• Optimize assets while respecting technical constraints, engine requirements, performance budgets, and established production workflows.
• Share knowledge and best practices with the Character Art team and support less experienced artists when needed.
• Support troubleshooting, bug fixing, documentation, and the creation of internal knowledge-base material.
• Communicate efficiently and collaborate effectively within a multidisciplinary and cooperative development environment, in English and French.
• Participate in reviews, give clear and constructive feedback to Character and Concept Artists, and professionally implement feedback from leads and peers.
• Contribute to R&D initiatives and help develop new tools, techniques, workflows, and pipeline improvements that increase visual quality and production efficiency.

Qualifications

• Significant professional experience in character art, ideally including one or more shipped AAA or high-quality game titles.
• A strong portfolio demonstrating exceptional realistic character art, focusing on AAA quality hard surface armor, clothing, materials, and game-ready assets.
• Excellent understanding of human anatomy, shape, form, proportion, value, color, materials, and other core art fundamentals.
• Advanced skills in both high-resolution sculpting and game-ready low-resolution modeling, including topology, UVs, baking, optimization, LOD creation, and final asset integration.
• Strong organic modeling skills, including realistic human faces, bodies and clothing.
• Strong hard-surface modeling skills for armor, equipment, props, and other character-related mechanical elements.
• Excellent knowledge of industry-standard character creation tools such as Maya, 3ds Max or Blender, ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter, Marvelous Designer, Photoshop, or equivalent software.
• Ability to interpret concept art while also confidently developing or pushing an initial design when additional artistic problem-solving is required.
• Ability to establish, maintain, and improve quality standards with minimal supervision.
• Ability to identify visual or technical problems, propose solutions, and contribute to R&D and workflow improvements.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to provide clear, actionable feedback and share knowledge with other artists.
• Fluency in English is required due to international studio collaboration and meetings held exclusively in English.

Nice to have

• Ability to create complex creature types, from humanoids and bipeds to quadrupeds and more unconventional anatomy.
• Experience with non-destructive modeling and procedural modeling techniques.

Working Environment and Benefits

• Work in a relaxed, innovative, and future-thinking environment.
• Studios located in Manchester, Los Angeles, Austin, and Frankfurt.
• Access to various sports and social groups, such as tabletop games, wargaming, yoga, football, and tennis.
• Commitment to a diverse workforce; candidates are considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or disability.