[Hiring] Hair Artist @Keywords Studios

Role Description

We're looking for a talented Senior Hair Artist to join our team and contribute to the creation of high-quality digital characters for an exciting AAA title.

Working closely with the client's character art team, you'll be responsible for creating realistic, performant, and visually compelling hair and fur assets that meet the project's artistic vision and technical requirements. You'll collaborate with Character Artists, Technical Artists, Art Directors, and production teams to ensure grooms are delivered to the highest quality while integrating seamlessly into the game's pipeline.

This role is ideal for someone with a strong artistic eye, deep technical knowledge of real-time hair workflows, and a passion for creating believable digital characters.

What You'll Do

• Create high-quality real-time hair, fur, eyebrows, eyelashes, facial hair, and other grooming assets for hero and supporting characters.
• Develop hair grooms that faithfully capture the intended style, silhouette, and personality of each character.
• Collaborate closely with Character Artists and Art Directors to achieve the desired visual quality and artistic direction.
• Optimise hair assets to meet performance, memory, and platform requirements without compromising visual fidelity.
• Integrate and refine hair assets within the game engine, ensuring they function correctly with shading, simulation, and animation systems.
• Work alongside Technical Artists to resolve technical challenges relating to grooming workflows, shaders, simulation, and rendering.
• Maintain consistency across multiple characters while adapting to a variety of hairstyles and art styles.
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues relating to deformation, physics, LODs, and asset implementation.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of grooming workflows, documentation, and production pipelines.

Qualifications

• Significant professional experience as a Hair Artist, Groom Artist, or Character Artist specialising in hair for AAA console or PC titles.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating realistic or highly stylised real-time hair creation across a range of characters.
• Excellent understanding of hair grooming principles, shape, flow, layering, and silhouette.
• Experience with industry-standard grooming tools such as XGen, Ornatrix, Houdini, Blender Hair, or equivalent.
• Experience authoring real-time hair cards and/or strand-based hair depending on project requirements.
• Strong understanding of hair textures, shaders, materials, transparency, and rendering techniques.
• Experience implementing hair assets within modern game engines such as Unreal Engine or Unity.
• Good understanding of optimisation techniques for real-time character rendering.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively within multidisciplinary and distributed teams.
• Self-motivated, organised, and capable of managing work independently.

Desirable

• Experience shipping one or more AAA titles featuring high-quality digital characters.
• Experience with strand-based grooming workflows in Unreal Engine 5.
• Knowledge of hair simulation, cloth simulation, and character rigging workflows.
• Experience creating fur or creature grooms.
• Familiarity with scan-based character pipelines and physically based rendering workflows.
• Experience mentoring artists or contributing to grooming standards and best practices.

Company Description

Established in 2004, Lakshya Digital - a Keywords Studio - is the largest interactive entertainment and game development services studio in South Asia. Our main production studios are in India, and we maintain satellite studios in Europe, North America, and Japan.

Employment Details

• Studio: Keywords Studios
• Location: Canada, US
• Area of Work: Art Services
• Service: Create
• Employment Type: Contract
• Working Pattern: Full Time, Remote