[Hiring] Character Lighting & Look Development Artist @Hatsu Labs

Role Description

We’re looking for a Character Lighting & Look Development Artist to own the visual presentation of our hero characters in a cinematic narrative game built in Unity URP. Your primary focus will be character lighting across visual novel scenes and cinematic vignettes, as well as producing polished promotional character renders and key art at multiple quality tiers — making sure every character looks stunning, emotionally resonant, and visually distinct.

You’ll work closely with character artists, environment artists, and technical artists to craft lighting setups that treat our characters as the emotional core of the game, while keeping performance viable on mobile.

Key Responsibilities

• Hero Character Lighting: Design and implement lighting that enhances the beauty, readability, and emotional impact of characters in VN scenes and cinematics, with special attention to skin, eyes, and hair.
• Promotional Character Renders: Create and refine lighting and compositing setups for collectible character key art and promotional renders across multiple quality tiers, ensuring each tier has a distinct visual identity.
• Cinematic Atmosphere: Establish mood-driven lighting direction across narrative scenes and cutscenes, ensuring characters remain the focal point while environments provide complementary tone and depth.
• Performance-Aware Implementation: Balance baked and real-time lighting in Unity URP, leveraging Forward+ rendering, light probes, and reflection probes to achieve high visual quality within mobile constraints.
• Lighting Pipeline: Manage HDRIs, LUTs, and post-processing stacks to maintain visual consistency and flexibility across scenes.
• Collaboration: Partner with character artists and technical artists to ensure lighting interacts naturally with materials and shaders, providing feedback on material and texture quality as needed.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a Lighting Artist in games, animation, or real-time projects, with a portfolio emphasizing character and cinematic lighting.
• Experience lighting in Unity (URP preferred), with at least one shipped real-time project.
• Strong understanding of lighting fundamentals — color, contrast, composition, and how lighting drives mood and emotion.
• Familiarity with mobile lighting workflows, including baked lightmaps, light probes, reflection probes, and post-processing optimization.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with cross-disciplinary teams and respond quickly to creative feedback.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with look development — tweaking materials, textures, and shaders to achieve a target visual quality.
• Experience lighting for stylized or non-photorealistic rendering pipelines.
• Experience creating distinct visual treatments for different tiers of collectible character art or promotional renders.
• An eye for character posing, composition, and camera framing for promotional renders and key art.
• Experience with cinematic lighting for narrative sequences or cutscenes.
• Familiarity with LUT creation and color grading workflows.
• Knowledge of PBR materials and how lighting interacts with different surface types (fabric, skin, hair).