Cinematic Character Artist (Photorealistic Characters)

The project centers on training machine learning networks to assist artists and game developers in enhancing rendering performance and quality. The team creates a diverse array of photorealistic 3D human characters at film and cinematic quality, rendered using offline path tracers such as Arnold, RenderMan, and Cycles, and adapts them for real-time engines when necessary.

The work encompasses the entire cinematic character pipeline, including sculpting, topology, texturing, and look development of skin, hair, and cloth, as well as facial expressions, grooming, and rigging. The project also engages with emerging rendering standards like MaterialX, OpenPBR, and UE5 Substrate.

The training process covers a broad range of complex scenarios involving advanced shading, lighting, motion, post-processing, upscaling, and antialiasing. Each scenario requires high-quality ground truth data that accurately meets production standards for cinematic CGI and game development.

Artists involved in the project utilize a variety of modern, industry-standard technologies and software. The primary rendering engines include Blender Cycles, Unreal Engine, and custom renderers based on GLTF, USD, and MaterialX data.

• Create photorealistic human characters from scratch and using Character Creator 5 (sculpting, animation-ready topology, UVs, texturing) following a cinematic character art pipeline
• Build characters to specific technical descriptions, prioritizing model and material accuracy over stylistic choices
• Perform look development in Arnold, RenderMan and Cycles: skin with SSS and translucency, wrinkle maps, cloth and hair shading
• Create groomed hair systems (strand/curve-based) and upgrade card-based hair to grooms
• Set up facial expressions, blendshapes/morphs, poses and clothing
• Adapt existing assets for cinematic quality or real-time performance as the task requires
• Export and set up characters with materials across offline renderers and, when needed, Unreal Engine 5
• Occasionally adjust skeletons and rigs, retarget animation and mocap data

MUST

• 3+ years in a cinematic, film/VFX or high-end character art pipeline
• Production experience with offline renderers: Arnold, RenderMan, Cycles
• Proven ability to create a photorealistic human from scratch via sculpting (ZBrush or Blender) and polymodeling, with animation-ready topology and facial morphs
• Strong look development skills: skin SSS, translucency, wrinkle maps, cloth and hair shading, PBR material composition
• Experience with strand-based grooming (XGen, Yeti, Blender hair curves or similar)
• Texturing in Substance Painter / Mari, including procedural approaches
• Portfolio with photorealistic characters and breakdowns is mandatory: material/shader graphs, topology, UVs, grooms, facial morphs, rigging

NICE TO HAVE

• Unreal Engine 5: character setup, Groom, Path Tracer, Substrate materials
• Game-ready character optimization (LODs, card-based hair, real-time shading)
• Reallusion Character Creator (CC5) and/or MetaHuman workflows
• Rigging and animation: skeleton edits, UE5 retargeting, mocap and motion matching data
• MaterialX and OpenPBR standards