About the role
Company Information
Lakshya, a Keywords Studios company, is headquartered in Gurgaon, India, with a team of over 700 employees across studio facilities in Gurgaon, Pune, and Seattle, and sales offices in San Diego and Tokyo. Established in 2004, the studio has 20 years of experience in the game development industry, having contributed to titles such as Bloodborne, Dark Souls II, Just Cause 3, WWE 2K16, Uncharted 2, Farmville, and Cityville. The company works closely with NASSCOM to support the growth of the game development ecosystem in India.
About the Role
Foliage Artists are integral members of the art team responsible for creating complex and high-quality vegetation assets for games. Responsibilities include interpreting project requirements, establishing foliage workflows, creating benchmark assets, troubleshooting technical issues, providing support to other artists, contributing to effort estimation, and performing artistic and technical reviews.
Responsibilities
- Study and interpret project briefs and specifications to understand foliage requirements.
- Assist in effort estimation for foliage assets and related tasks.
- Contribute to pre-production by collecting botanical references, defining workflows, creating checklists, and raising queries.
- Establish foliage creation workflows through sample and benchmark assets.
- Create high-quality, optimized game-ready vegetation assets as per project requirements.
- Create and optimize foliage models, textures, atlases, materials, LODs, and wind setups.
- Ensure foliage assets meet required polycount, texel density, UV, texture, and performance standards.
- Provide direction and guidance to foliage artists and perform first-level artistic and technical reviews.
- Help troubleshoot foliage-related DCC, material, shader, wind, LOD, and engine integration issues.
- Identify risks and suggest improvements to foliage workflows and production quality.
- Communicate work status, risks, and dependencies to the Lead and PM.
- Ensure assigned work is completed within the budgeted effort and required quality standards.
Requirements
Skills
- Excellent skills in creating realistic, game-ready trees, plants, bushes, grass, vines, and other vegetation.
- High proficiency in foliage creation tools such as SpeedTree and GrowFX.
- Strong knowledge of 3ds Max, Maya, Blender, Photoshop, and ZBrush.
- Hands-on experience with Substance Designer and Substance Painter for foliage textures and materials.
- Strong understanding of PBR materials, foliage shaders, translucency, subsurface scattering, and wind animation.
- Strong knowledge of real-time foliage workflows in Unreal Engine and/or Unity.
- Good understanding of LODs, Nanite, UVs, texture atlasing, texel density, optimization, and performance requirements.
- Good understanding of plant anatomy, species identification, growth patterns, and natural variation.
- Strong attention to detail.
- Good communication skills – verbal and written.
- Self-starter and team player.
Experience
- Experience in creating 3D foliage/vegetation assets for AAA games or similar high-quality game projects.
Role Information
- Studio: Lakshya
- Location: Asia Pacific, India
- Area of Work: Art Services
- Service: Create
- Employment Type: Full Time/Contractor
- Working Pattern: Onsite