Principal Material Artist - Hard Surface
HybridRoyal Leamington Spa, England, United Kingdom
Job Summary
Define the material quality bar for the Vehicle Art team by establishing best practices for photorealistic hard-surface materials and shaders. Design, develop, and maintain complex Unreal Master Material Shaders and scalable systems to support diverse vehicle content. Create benchmark-quality PBR textures and Material Instances for metals, paints, plastics, composites, rubber, glass, and interior finishes. Partner with Art Leadership and Technical Artists to shape workflows that maximize realism, consistency, and production efficiency. Establish and evolve material pipelines, identifying opportunities for automation and standardization. Collaborate on rendering challenges to optimize shader content within performance targets. Drive research into real-world vehicles and manufacturing processes to raise team expertise.
Required Qualifications
- Extensive experience developing, implementing, optimising and maintaining complex photorealistic PBR materials and shaders within Unreal Engine, operating at a senior or principal level
- Expert knowledge of hard-surface material creation, with a strong portfolio demonstrating highly realistic materials across vehicles, machinery, products or comparable assets
- Exceptional ability to study real-world reference and understand material construction, manufacturing processes, surface response, wear and variation in order to produce convincing results
- Advanced proficiency in content creation tools such as Substance Painter/Designer, Max/Maya/Blender, RealityCapture or equivalent software and pipelines
- Deep understanding of real-time rendering, lighting, PBR workflows, shader development and performance considerations, with the ability to solve complex artistic and technical problems
- Proven ability to influence quality across a team, communicate specialist knowledge effectively and provide guidance, mentorship and direction to other artists
Desired Qualifications
- Significant experience creating materials for vehicles, automotive visualisation or similarly complex high-end hard-surface assets
- Strong knowledge of photogrammetry, photography, scanning and physically accurate material capture techniques
- A strong interest in vehicles, automotive design or motorsport
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