Principal Material Artist - Hard Surface

Lighthouse Games is a new AAA studio in Leamington Spa. We are defined by our pedigree of talent and serious ambition to build a new best-in-class game. When you join us at Lighthouse, you’ll create the best work of your career within a collaborative, hybrid working environment. You’ll learn from the best and work alongside the future greats of the gaming industry.

As a Principal Material Artist – Hard Surface, you will play a leading role in defining the quality, direction and technical standards of material creation across our Vehicle Art team. Bringing deep expertise in hard-surface materials and photorealistic rendering, you will work closely with Vehicle Artists, Art Leadership, Technical Artists and Render Engineers to establish scalable workflows and push the visual quality of our ground-breaking new IP.

You will use detailed real-world reference to understand how vehicle materials are manufactured, constructed, aged and presented, translating those observations into highly believable in-game results. As a Principal Artist, you will combine hands-on content creation with discipline-level influence, helping solve complex challenges, setting best practices and supporting other artists in achieving an exceptional quality bar.

Key Duties Include

• Define and champion the material quality bar for the Vehicle Art team, establishing best practices for photorealistic hard-surface materials and shaders.
• Design, develop and maintain complex Unreal Master Material Shaders and scalable material systems that support a wide range of vehicle content.
• Create benchmark-quality PBR textures and Material Instances, accurately representing materials such as metals, paints, plastics, composites, rubber, glass and interior finishes.
• Partner with Art Leadership, Vehicle Artists and other disciplines to shape material workflows and technical solutions that maximise realism, consistency and production efficiency.
• Establish, document and evolve material pipelines, identifying opportunities for automation, standardisation and new tools that improve quality and scalability.
• Collaborate with Technical Artists and Render Engineers to solve complex rendering challenges, optimise shader content and ensure visual ambition is achieved within performance targets.
• Drive research into real-world vehicles, manufacturing processes, material properties and emerging technologies, sharing knowledge and helping raise the expertise of the wider art team.

Requirements

• 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.

Desirable

• 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.

Benefits

• 25 Days Holiday, plus 1 day for your birthday
• Studio Shutdown between Christmas and New Year
• Discretionary Bonus Scheme
• Private Pension Scheme
• Private Healthcare
• Health and Well-Being Benefits
• Dental Care
• Optical treatments
• Mental Health Support