Senior Lookdev Artist – Temporary Contract

Job Position(s): Senior Lookdev Artist - Temporary Contract

Rodeo FX is hiring a Senior Lookdev Artist on a temporary contract basis in Montreal, QC. This role sits at the intersection of texturing, shading, and lighting within the VFX pipeline, responsible for developing and delivering photorealistic asset looks that hold up through lighting and compositing. It suits an experienced lookdev artist who has worked across feature film or episodic television production and knows how to translate a reference into a technically sound, render-ready asset.

About the Role

The Senior Lookdev Artist works within the asset development pipeline at Rodeo FX, collaborating directly with Texturing, Lighting, and Compositing departments to ensure visual and technical continuity across sequences. Day to day, this person is building and refining shaders, producing validation renders including turntables and AOV breakdowns, and integrating feedback from dailies into delivered assets. The role requires someone who can move efficiently between artistic problem-solving and pipeline-level technical work without losing either.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop complete asset looks by combining textures, physically plausible shaders, and validation lighting suited to each production’s requirements.
• Create and refine textures using photographic references, scans, digital painting, or procedural methods to achieve surface accuracy and visual consistency.
• Produce validation renders including turntables, AOV passes, and benchmark frames to support dailies reviews and supervisor sign-off.
• Design shader setups optimized for the production pipeline, ensuring compatibility with downstream Lighting and Compositing workflows.
• Identify and resolve technical texture issues including UV problems, tiling artifacts, displacement errors, and color space inconsistencies before they create bottlenecks.
• Contribute to the improvement of lookdev and texturing workflows, including development of shared tools, templates, and department best practices.

What You Bring

• Several years of lookdev or texturing experience on feature film VFX or high-end episodic television productions.
• Strong proficiency in industry-standard shading and rendering tools, with a solid understanding of physically based rendering principles.
• Experience with Mari, Substance, or equivalent texture authoring software alongside a major renderer such as Arnold, RenderMan, or Karma.
• Demonstrated ability to read and interpret visual references and translate them into shaders that achieve a high level of photorealism.
• Comfort working within a structured VFX post-production workflow with defined deadlines and review cycles.

Why This Role

Rodeo FX has built a consistent track record delivering complex VFX work across major studio features and premium television series, with facilities in Montreal and a reputation for strong craft at the asset level. A temporary contract here offers direct exposure to a structured, high-output VFX pipeline and collaboration with experienced supervision across multiple departments.

Apply now for the Senior Lookdev Artist position at Rodeo FX and bring your texturing and shading expertise to one of Montreal’s established visual effects studios.