Senior Technical Artist

**What we need**:
Smilegate Europe is looking for an experienced and talented Houdini Technical Artist, to join our growing team of developers. We're looking for an individual who knows how to create tools, assets, and pipelines in Houdini that integrate well with Unreal Engine for the next generation of game platforms.

**What the role involves**:

- Work daily with production, art, and design teams to design, create, and implement production-ready world-building solutions within Houdini for export to Unreal Engine.
- Work with design and art to find areas for improvement and help prototype or implement solutions.
- Explore novel ways to populate and annotate game levels, allowing artists and designers to have a wider positive impact on the look and design without sacrificing creative control over their craft.
- Create new or modify existing world-building methods to help speed up the iteration times of the Design and Art teams.
- Work to improve the tools artists use outside of the game engine, such as Substance Designer/Painter, 3ds Max, Maya, ZBrush, etc.
- Assist programmers and designers in researching and developing new game features.
- Help standardize the workflow and pipelines for asset creation.
- Drive and maintain performance goals and optimizations in tool development.

**Role requirements**:

- 2+ years developing tools and assets in Houdini for the game industry with one shipped title.
- 4+ years of experience developing stable and useful tools for asset development support, with two shipped titles.
- Thorough knowledge of Houdini asset and SOP-based tool development (including VEX and Python) for games, and Houdini Engine.
- Strong understanding of the performance implications of open-world development on consoles and PCs.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to effectively balance the needs of game design, art, and programming.
- A web portfolio that demonstrates usable game development and Houdini tools.
- Samples, demonstrations, or documentation of tools pipelines developed to overcome development challenges.

**Desirable**
- Be able to work comfortably with common scripting languages (MAXScript, MEL script, Python, etc.)
- Experience with shading language (HLSL/CG/etc.)
- Experience using 3ds Max, Maya, and Substance Designer or Painter.

**About us**:
Aiming to create best-in-class experiences that last forever in players' memories, a team of Game Industry veterans is building a new AAA Open World game studio in Barcelona, backed by a quality-first market-leading publisher and developer. If you are an experienced team player who loves game creation, values autonomy within a multi-national team, and would welcome the challenge of building new IPs and career-defining games - get in touch

**Working at Smilegate Barcelona**:

- Breakfast in the Office.
- Restaurant Tickets: approx 180 € per month (2.160€/year).
- 23 vacation days per year + Christmas to the new year (the office is closed from 24th December to2nd January).
- Develop your career working in a super exciting environment with a great working atmosphere, international work environment
- Fully stocked studio kitchen (Nescafe coffee, organic fruits, snacks and beverages).
- Beer Thursdays
- Flexible Working Hours & Flexible Friday.
- Flexible working conditions of Work From Home.
- Private Health insurance including dental coverage.
- Team Building Events.
- Relocation Package/assistance and VISA support.
- Much more still to come

**Are you ready to join our Smile-family? We are already excited to have you