Technical Artist Internship 2021

As a Technical Artist at Rare, you'll be responsible for delivering beautiful and captivating visual experiences to our players. You'll contribute to a 30-year history of delivering visually stunning games, using cutting-edge techniques to solve problems, and showing your own inventiveness to tackle challenges that have not yet been solved in the industry.

Activities

Technical Artists can expect to interact with almost every aspect of game production. This role is about marrying art and technology in unique, creative ways. Tech Art interns can find themselves working on tools and pipeline improvements for other artists, drawing on their own experience of making art to come up with and implement inventive improvements to the process. They may find themselves working with engineers on gameplay features, or even with the rendering team, prototyping and implementing entirely new graphics techniques.

The desire to learn, fit into a team environment and positively increase the quality of the game as a whole, is a must – everybody on the team gets their hands dirty in all areas of game production! It’s all about the individual’s strengths and passions. Whether that’s tooling, procedural content, writing shaders, or something else that we’ve never seen before, we want artists who will bring their own unique views and ideas to the project and the drive to innovate in their areas of interest.

We’re big believers in high quality artwork here at Rare and, since we’re developing our products as services, we aim for fast iteration using common methods. This means that we embrace modern development practices such as Continuous Delivery, automated testing, team art reviews and agile methods.

On the software side, our artists use industry standards and specialist applications such as Maya, Houdini, Substance Designer/Painter, Zbrush, Photoshop, etc. Technical Art interns could also reasonably expect to work on products using commercial game engines such as Unreal Engine 4 and possibly on our own in-house technology. Across the Tech Art department, we love to tackle challenges from all directions. Sometimes that can take the form of Python tooling in Maya, writing scripts for Photoshop, creating standalone C# applications, learning a new third-party tool, building HLSL shaders or even writing game code in C++!

Key Accountabilities

• In conjunction with artists, designers, engineers, and testers; identify, implement and iterate on game features and pipeline requirements.
• Identify and surface risks in the areas that are being worked on.
• Solve problems through the application of sound common sense.
• Continuously work to minimize technical debt and art quality debt and rework.
• Devote time to personal improvement in order to further their own game development, art and technical knowledge.
• Write concise documentation of tools and assets that other teams can rely on.

Required Experience and Capabilities

• Experience of producing CG art and a passion for the technology of state-of-the-art visuals and authoring techniques.
• Technical experience – familiarity with writing code, e.g., in the context of tooling and scripting for a content creation package, graphics or real-time interactive applications.
• A portfolio or technical blog demonstrating your ability in CG art and/or coding.

Please note:

• IT IS NOT ESSENTIAL TO HAVE EXPERIENCE IN COMPUTER GAMES DEVELOPMENT OR TO BE ON A GAMES-SPECIFIC COURSE

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. 

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

Desirable Experience

None of these are essential but the more the better:

• Experience with 3D graphics content generation tools (e.g., Maya, ZBrush).
• Experience with 2D graphics content generation tools (e.g., Photoshop).
• Experience with procedural content generation tools (e.g., Substance Designer, Houdini).
• Experience in off the shelf Engine/Editors (e.g., Unreal 4, Unity).
• Strong traditional art skills.
• A love for stylized visuals – exploring and understanding the art pipeline and rendering techniques involved.
• Artwork interests outside of those prescribed by a university course (e.g., personal portfolio, online competitions, independent game projects, involvement in a modding community).
• Creative activities (e.g., interest in art principles, photography, creative writing, game art).
• General programming skills in languages used within game development (e.g., Python, C#, C++).
• Experience writing shaders for real-time rendering (e.g., HLSL, GLSL, CGFX).
• Understanding of real-time rendering pipelines in modern game engines.
• Experience of any of the areas of game development mentioned in the Activities section of this document.