Technical Artist

Aesir Interactive GmbH; München; Hybrid; EUR 70.000 - 95.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

Aesir Interactive GmbH is seeking a Technical Artist for Unreal Engine 5 on AA titles, collaborating across art, design and programming teams in Munich. You will shape materials, shaders, and tooling to hit performance budgets while maintaining visual quality.

Responsibilities include authoring real-time VFX in Niagara, UI integration via UMG, and building data-driven pipelines. Strong UE5 experience and scripting ability are essential for this role.

Qualifikationen

• 3+ years of hands-on production experience in game development, ideally on a shipped title.
• Solid, hands-on UE5 knowledge: project structure, asset organisation, editor tools.
• Confidence in the Material Editor: complex graphs, PBR, texture packing, UV management.
• Awareness of runtime cost: draw calls, passes, LODs.
• Solid 3D and math fundamentals: vectors, matrices, transforms.
• Scripting: Blueprint, Python or C++, basic coding hygiene.
• Artistic eye and ability to serve art direction.
• Awareness of rigging, skinning, animation fundamentals and Niagara VFX.
• Experience with Perforce in a team setting.
• Builds usable tools with good documentation for reuse.

Aufgaben

• Build and maintain materials, shaders and libraries in UE5 with performance focus.
• Author real-time VFX in Niagara: particles and environment effects.
• Implement UIs with UMG and Slate.
• Create procedural generation pipelines (PCG, Houdini Engine).
• Set up animation systems with Control Rig and Animation Blueprints.
• Integrate audio with MetaSounds and Sound Cues.
• Develop editor tooling and automation (Editor Utility Widgets, Python, blueprints).
• Bridge between DCC tools and Unreal with import/export rules.
• Profile and optimize content using Unreal Insights and RenderDoc.

Kenntnisse

UE5

Material Editor

Python

C++

Blueprint

Niagara

Perforce

HLSL

Automation

Art-technical collaboration

Tools

Unreal Editor

Houdini Engine

Blender

RenderDoc

Unreal Insights

Jobbeschreibung

Your role:

As a Technical Artist, you are responsible for getting art into the engine at the intended quality and within the performance budget. Tech Art sits between Art and Tech, and covers a deliberately wide surface: materials and shaders, animation systems, UI, VFX, audio integration, procedural content, and the tooling that keeps it aintainable. The department is small, so your focus changes over the course of a project. You will work in Unreal Engine 5 on AA titles for PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch, in project teams of up to around 70 people. You are responsible for features and deliverables across a milestone or project phase, on your own or with others, in daily exchange with artists, animators, designers and programmers. Your setups determine the runtime cost of the visual target. The tools you build determine how fast everyone else can iterate. A material that hits the look but costs 4 ms on Switch is not finished. Our Technical Artists come from different backgrounds: artists who learned to script, programmers with an eye for visuals, technical designers and animators. You do not need to cover every point below, as long as you are willing to learn the rest.

The kind of stuff you’ll be doing:

• Build and maintain materials, shaders and material libraries in UE5 — complex graphs, material functions and instances, simple HLSL custom nodes — and own how they perform, not just how they look.
• Author real-time VFX in Niagara: particles, environment effects, ability and player feedback.
• Implement user interfaces with UMG, and Slate where UMG runs out.
• Build and maintain procedural generation pipelines (PCG, Houdini Engine).
• Set up animation systems and the tools around them — Control Rig, Animation Blueprints — and support rigging, skinning and animation topics for the people who live in them every day.
• Integrate audio with MetaSounds and Sound Cues.
• Develop editor tooling that automates work instead of documenting it: Editor Utility Widgets and Actions, Python, editor-exposed functions, commandlets. Blueprint, Unreal C++ and AngelScript are all fair game.
• Set up and maintain the art pipelines between the DCC tools (Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini) and Unreal, including import/export rules and validation that catches mistakes before they reach the build.
• Profile and optimise content with Unreal Insights, RenderDoc and the platform profilers — on PC and on console — find the actual bottleneck, and fix it without giving up the visual target.
• Support the art team on the technical side of their assets: mesh topology, UV channels, vertex colours and weights, material slots, LOD setups.
• Build data-driven setups (Data Tables, CSV/JSON, Data Assets) so designers and artists can iterate on values without waiting for an engineer.
• Break down the problems you’re given, estimate your own work and align expectations before you start; peer-review other Tech Artists’ deliverables and document your own approach so the next person can follow it.

Your Profile

Must-haves

• 3+ years of hands-on production experience in game development, ideally on a shipped title. UE4/UE5 preferred if you’re coming from another engine, tell us what transfers.
• Solid, hands-on UE5 knowledge: project structure, asset organisation, the editor and its main toolsets, and how the engine’s feature sets connect to each other.
• Confidence in the Material Editor: complex material graphs, PBR workflows, material instances and functions, texture packing and UV channel management — plus reading and writing simple HLSL.
• You know where the cost of your setups comes from and how to measure it: draw calls, passes, LODs, and why the material you’re proud of just cost 4 ms.
• Solid 3D and math fundamentals — vector and matrix math, transforms, coordinate spaces, geometry, trigonometry and a good understanding of how mesh data is authored, exported and consumed by the engine.
• You script. Blueprint fluency plus a working foundation in Python or C++, basic coding hygiene included — and the reflex behind it: if a task is going to recur, you automate it.
• A real artistic eye colour, composition, aesthetic consistency, game feel and the discipline to serve someone else’s art direction rather than your own.
• Awareness of rigging, skinning and animation fundamentals, and of VFX principles in Niagara.
• Perforce, or a comparable version control system built for large binary assets, in a team setting.
• You build things other people can use: clean by default, documented, and explained in workflows an artist can follow — because what you build gets reused across projects and by people who won’t ask you first. You raise problems early rather than letting them surface late.
• You want to make games, not just work in games. We will ask what you last built, broke or took apart — a side project, a shader experiment, a mod, a tool that saved you an hour. Size doesn’t matter; the pull does.
• You learn continuously because you enjoy it. UE5 moves every few months, and the people who do well here find that interesting rather than exhausting.
• Confident English, spoken and written it’s our company and project language.
• Munich. That’s where the team is and where we’d like you to be. We’ve made the occasional exception for someone exceptional if you think that’s you, make the case.

Nice-to-haves

Nobody has all of these. They’re here so you can see what we actually work with and if you arrive with a specialisation, we’d rather find out what it is and use it than hire around it.

• A first specialisation in one of our high-demand areas: in-engine animation workflows (Control Rig, Animation Blueprints, Motion Matching), UI implementation (UMG), performance optimisation, or procedural generation (