Senior Technical Artist — Real-Time Materials Mastery

Epic Games; North Carolina; On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401k with company match

Unlimited PTO

Sabbatical after 7 years

Mental health program

Job summary

Epic Games is seeking a Technical Artist with a strong focus on material creation to join the Fortnite team. You’ll build game-ready materials for characters and cosmetics using Unreal Engine, collaborating with artists, engineers and other tech artists to deliver scalable, high-fidelity visuals.

You should have a solid reel demonstrating real-time materials and deep knowledge of PBR workflows. Experience with Substance Designer/Painter and Houdini is preferred.

Qualifications

• A strong reel or portfolio demonstrating realtime game materials, ideally with character or cosmetic-focused examples.
• Advanced understanding of PBR workflows, real-time rendering constraints, and material authoring best practices.
• Proven experience creating complex materials using procedural textures and custom material behaviors.
• Hands-on experience with Substance Designer and Substance Painter for texture generation and asset authoring.
• Familiarity with the Unreal Engine 5 art and material pipeline.
• Experience developing content for multiple platforms.
• A solid understanding of modeling and texturing fundamentals within a real-time art pipeline, strong collaboration skills, and a desire to own features and initiatives from inception through ship.
• Bonus: Tools, scripting, or pipeline development experience for Unreal Engine, Substance Designer, and/or Substance Painter.
• Bonus: Experience in setting up or working with modern character art pipelines, building custom tools, templates, or automation to improve material and texture workflows.
• Bonus: Familiarity with Blueprints, Python, or similar scripting languages and experience in secondary areas such as modeling, lighting, or VFX.

Responsibilities

• Create high-quality, game-ready materials for characters and other cosmetics.
• Build materials that leverage procedural textures and custom material logic to achieve distinctive visual effects.
• Generate textures and bake data using tools such as Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and Houdini.
• Develop reusable material frameworks and workflows that enable tech artists and artists of other disciplines to efficiently create unique assets.
• Collaborate with character artists, tech artists, and engineers to integrate materials with geometry, effects, and Blueprints.
• Optimize materials and textures to meet performance, memory, and scalability targets across multiple platforms.
• Contribute to improving Unreal Engine material pipelines and best practices.

Skills

Material authoring

Procedural textures

Unreal Engine

Blueprints

Texture baking

Scripting (Python/Tools)

Cross-functional collaboration

Character art pipelines

Project ownership

Content for multiple platforms

Education

Portfolio demonstrating real-time game materials

Tools

Substance Designer

Substance Painter

Houdini

Unreal Engine 5

Job description

Epic Games is seeking a Technical Artist with a strong focus on material creation to join the Fortnite team. You’ll build game-ready materials for characters and cosmetics using Unreal Engine, collaborating with artists, engineers and other tech artists to deliver scalable, high-fidelity visuals.

You should have a solid reel demonstrating real-time materials and deep knowledge of PBR workflows. Experience with Substance Designer/Painter and Houdini is preferred.