Senior Environment Surfacing Artist (VFX/Animation)

Location: Madrid, Spain; hybrid workplace

Company

Skydance is a diversified media company creating feature film, television, interactive, and animation entertainment for global audiences.

What you will do

• Create and refine stylized and realistic textures, materials, and surfacing solutions for environments and props.
• Research visual references and translate the Production Designer’s vision into cohesive film-wide surface aesthetics.
• Maintain surfacing quality, consistency, physical properties, and visual direction across assets, environments, and sequences.
• Troubleshoot technical issues, optimize complex scenes and rendering workflows, and ensure timely asset delivery.
• Collaborate with Supervisors, Leads, and Modeling, Set Dressing, Rigging, Lighting, FX, and Compositing departments.
• Share knowledge with less experienced artists and propose solutions to artistic and technical challenges.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in the VFX or animation industry.
• Strong artistic sensibility and/or technical expertise related to 3D animation and VFX.
• Experience with RenderMan and/or Arnold.
• Experience with Substance 3D Painter, Substance 3D Designer, and/or Mari.
• Strong knowledge of UV creation and layout, including displacement workflows using maps and geometry output.
• Understanding of workflows in Modeling, Set Dressing, Lighting, FX, and Compositing.
• Experience optimizing complex scenes and rendering workflows, and managing large scenes, complex environments, and demanding sequences.
• Strong organizational, prioritization, time-management, and communication skills.

Nice to have

• 3+ years of experience in the animation industry.
• Knowledge of Houdini, Solaris, or Katana.
• Knowledge of USD and/or OSL.
• Knowledge of vegetation workflows, including instances and scatters.
• High English level.

Culture & Benefits

• Dynamic, inclusive, and evolving culture focused on creative collaboration and technological advancement.
• Opportunity to contribute to a new animation studio and ambitious event-level entertainment projects.
• Full-time hybrid work in Madrid.