# Lighting Artist **Company**: Keywords Studios **Location**: Orlando, FL **Work arrangement**: onsite **Experience**: senior **Job type**: full-time **Category**: Design **Industry**: Technology **Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q64141679 **Apply**: https://apply.workable.com/keywords-intl1/j/CC595D4F4B/?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_21ba5bdf-2aa ## Description GameSim, a game development studio under Keywords Studios, is seeking a Lighting Artist to create high-quality real-time lighting and help support the execution of lighting work across GameSim projects. This is a hands-on production role with opportunities to take on project-level leadership responsibilities. The Lighting Artist will collaborate with various teams to translate creative direction into lighting solutions that support mood, gameplay readability, environmental storytelling, and performance. **Responsibilities** ### Lighting Creation and Execution - Create high-quality real-time lighting for gameplay environments, levels, cinematics, characters, and interactive sequences. - Translate art direction, concept art, reference material, gameplay requirements, narrative goals, and client feedback into effective lighting solutions. - Use lighting to establish mood, atmosphere, visual hierarchy, environmental storytelling, and player focus. - Ensure lighting supports gameplay readability, navigation, combat visibility, character presentation, and important interactive elements. - Develop and refine exposure, color, contrast, fog, atmosphere, reflections, shadows, emissive response, color grading, and post-processing. - Create lighting for a range of visual styles, including realistic, stylized, cinematic, and highly art-directed projects. - Maintain visual consistency across related environments, gameplay spaces, sequences, times of day, and lighting conditions. - Bring assigned scenes from initial lighting setup through final polish. - Respond to feedback from Art Direction, project leadership, and clients in a timely and professional manner. - Ensure completed work meets project requirements for quality, performance, organization, and delivery. ### Leadership and Quality Support - Help oversee lighting work for an assigned scene, group of scenes, feature, or milestone when requested by project leadership. - Review the work of other lighting artists or multidisciplinary artists contributing to lighting. - Provide clear, respectful, and actionable feedback through written notes, live reviews, reference images, paintovers, or in-engine examples. - Help ensure lighting work follows approved visual targets, technical standards, and project requirements. - Communicate expected outcomes, priorities, and quality standards to artists working within an assigned area. - Monitor the visual progress of assigned lighting work and identify scenes that may require additional revision or support. - Confirm that feedback has been addressed before work is submitted for senior, Art Director, or client review. - Support junior or less-experienced artists with lighting fundamentals, engine workflows, scene organization, optimization, and production practices. - Lead by example through reliable execution, clear communication, constructive collaboration, and professional conduct. - Escalate unresolved quality, schedule, scope, or technical concerns to the appropriate senior artist, Art Director, or Producer. ### Planning and Production Support - Work with Art Direction and Production to understand lighting priorities, tasks, estimates, and milestone expectations. - Help break lighting goals into clear and manageable production tasks. - Provide progress updates and communicate when assigned work is at risk of missing quality, technical, or scheduling requirements. - Participate in daily reviews, art reviews, milestone evaluations, and planning discussions. - Help prepare lighting work for internal reviews, client presentations, milestone submissions, and final delivery. - Balance hands-on production responsibilities with review, coordination, troubleshooting, and team support. - Adjust priorities when creative direction, technical requirements, production scope, or client feedback changes. - Maintain accurate task status and documentation using the project’s production-management tools. ### Technical and Pipeline Responsibilities - Work with Technical Art and Engineering to ensure lighting is visually effective, technically stable, and appropriate for the target platform. - Follow established budgets for dynamic lights, shadows, volumetrics, reflections, global illumination, memory, and scalability. - Identify and help resolve issues involving exposure, shadow artifacts, light leaking, reflections, volumetrics, bake quality, material response, and post-processing. - Use dynamic, baked, stationary, or hybrid lighting approaches according to the project’s established pipeline. - Profile assigned lighting work and make informed visual adjustments to meet performance requirements. - Validate lighting across relevant gameplay cameras, display settings, hardware targets, times of day, weather states, and scalability levels. - Follow project standards for scene organization, naming conventions, source control, documentation, and asset integration. - Contribute to reusable lighting setups, templates, documentation, validation processes, and team best practices. - Identify workflow problems and communicate potential improvements to senior artists, Technical Art, or project leadership. ### Cross-Discipline Collaboration - Collaborate with Environment Art to ensure geometry, materials, composition, and set dressing support the intended lighting. - Partner with VFX to integrate fog, particles, weather, fire, emissive effects, and atmospheric elements. - Work with Design to ensure lighting supports navigation, player guidance, combat readability, objectives, and interactive systems. - Coordinate with Character Art and Animation to maintain readable and appealing character presentation. - Support cinematic lighting needs involving shot composition, continuity, exposure, character lighting, and narrative focus. - Communicate artistic and technical concerns clearly to both creative and non-creative stakeholders. - Work effectively with distributed teams, partner studios, external vendors, and clients across different time zones. **Requirements** - Professional experience creating lighting for games, real-time projects, animation, visualization, or a closely related field. - A portfolio or reel demonstrating strong real-time lighting work. - Strong understanding of lighting fundamentals, including value, color, contrast, composition, visual hierarchy, atmosphere, exposure, shadow, and material response. - Experience lighting gameplay environments or interactive real-time scenes. - Understanding of how lighting supports mood, gameplay readability, navigation, environmental storytelling, and player focus. - Professional experience using Unreal Engine or another modern real-time engine. - Experience with dynamic or baked lighting, global illumination, reflections, volumetrics, exposure, color grading, and post-processing. - Working knowledge of physically based rendering and material response. - Understanding of basic lighting optimization, including light cost, shadows, volumetrics, reflections, scalability, and platform constraints. - Ability to take ownership of assigned scenes and follow them through review and completion. - Ability to receive, interpret, and implement artistic and technical feedback. - Experience reviewing artwork or providing constructive feedback to teammates. - Ability to identify work that does not meet an established quality target and communicate practical improvements. - Ability to balance visual quality, technical requirements, production scope, and schedule. - Strong written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills. - Ability to organize priorities, communicate risks, and follow work through to completion. - Experience collaborating with multiple game-development disciplines. - Ability to adapt to different projects, visual styles, engines, pipelines, platforms, and client expectations. - Ability to work effectively both independently and as part of a distributed team. ## Skills ### Required - Unreal Engine - Real-time lighting - Physically based rendering - Material response - Dynamic lighting - Baked lighting - Global illumination - Reflections - Volumetrics - Exposure - Color grading - Post-processing ### Nice to have - Lumen - GPU Lightmass - CPU Lightmass - Photoshop - DaVinci Resolve - Nuke - After Effects - Maya - Blender - 3ds Max - Perforce - Jira - Confluence - Miro --- Source: [Apply at apply.workable.com](https://apply.workable.com/keywords-intl1/j/CC595D4F4B/?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)