Associate Art Director, 3D Character Art - Unpublished R&D Product

Associate Art Directors at Riot oversee the quality and performance of their teams, with a focus on Mission, Direction, and Cohesion. In this role, your primary responsibility is to lead the Character Art efforts on a project, ensuring the team’s deliverables meet the highest standards of artistic quality. You’ll be accountable for building and maintaining a highly functional team, cultivating a strong culture, and supporting the performance, growth, and development of your direct reports. As the project moves from prototype through pre-production and into full production, you’ll guide the character art discipline to deliver excellence at every stage.

As the Associate Art Director, 3D Character Art, you will design and lead a world-class character art organization that brings the product’s creative and gameplay goals to life. You’ll define the team’s vision and structure, driving the creation of compelling player characters, gear, and creatures that strike the right balance between visual excellence and gameplay clarity. By partnering closely with Art Direction, Design, Production, and Engineering, you’ll ensure the character team’s work elevates the overall player experience and scales effectively from prototype to live product. This role reports to the Art Director.

Responsibilities:

• Develop the character art style and aesthetic through in-game work, style guides, best practices and communication with the team.  Lead and leverage the character team to high quality execution on the art style.
• Partner with recruiting to hire world-class artists to build a team that can scale to meet the development goals of the product
• Create exemplary stylized art assets in a broad range, including humans, creatures, props and clothing, organics and hard-surface.
• Work with Concept Artists to establish the right process to fulfill your team’s concept art needs.
• Understand and be ready to discuss approaches in style, ranging from proportions to hand painted, as well as technical and design constraints such as draw calls, poly counts, texture memory limits, modularity, and gameplay clarity.
• Build outsourcing strategies and necessary documentation to ensure internal and external teams are set up for success
• Partner with Design and Product teams to understand their goals and product needs, leading cross-discipline collaboration to create innovative character art solutions that elevate both gameplay and the overall player experience.
• Build and maintain a diverse, healthy, highly functional Character Art team that’s strongly aligned with Riot Values, working quickly and effectively to resolve team health issues.
• Partner with Production to create the right amount of visibility into your team’s deliverables and velocity.
• Be a great career mentor and coach for the artists on your team.

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of industry experience
• 4+ years of people and performance management experience
• Proven track record of leading multi-disciplinary art teams from concept through production
• Experience building successful character teams
• Experience working cross discipline to create production ready pipelines and standards from scratch
• Professional experience working in stylized art styles
• Experience working with modern stylized PBR workflows
• Experience working with modern game engines such as Unity, Unreal, or proprietary technologies
• Proficient skills in 3D/2D Software - Maya, 3DS Max, Substance.

Desired Qualifications

• Experience working on a highly recognizable stylized game
• Experience working in pre-production for at least one game title
• Experience with hand-painted art styles and/or Illustration techniques

When submitting your application, please provide a portfolio of your high-quality character art - including stylized artwork. And as a part of the application process, you may also be asked to complete an art test.

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise, a collaborative spirit, and decision-making that prioritizes the delight of players. We will be looking at your past studies, experience, and your personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about players' experiences, this could be your role!

Our Perks:

Riot focuses on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy and other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.

At Riot Games, we put players first. That mission drives every decision in our quest to create games and experiences that make it better to be a player. Whether you’re working directly on a new player-facing experience or you’re supporting the company as a whole, everyone at Riot is part of our mission. And just like in our games, we’re better when we work together. Our goal is to create collaborative teams where you are empowered to bring your unique perspective everyday. If that sounds like the kind of place you want to work, we’re looking forward to your application.

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