Senior Crowds Technical Artist

Skydance Media is hiring a Senior Crowds Technical Artist based in Madrid to join their VFX pipeline team. This role sits within the crowds department and is responsible for building and deploying crowd rigs, setting up Houdini-based assets, and executing crowd simulations to final quality on assigned sequences. It suits a technically grounded artist with real feature film production credits who is comfortable owning shot-level challenges while supporting a broader team.

About the Role

Working under the Crowds Supervisor and Lead, this position operates at the intersection of rigging, simulation, and pipeline within an animation studio production environment. The Senior Crowds Technical Artist builds master crowd rigs across bipeds, quadrupeds, and vehicles, then deploys those assets to crowd artists working on production shots. Day to day, the work moves between setting up HDAs in Houdini, troubleshooting VFX pipeline issues, and providing hands-on guidance to Crowd Animators.

Key Responsibilities

• Set up crowd assets and Houdini Digital Assets within the existing Houdini pipeline, testing new procedures and workflows under the direction of the Crowds Lead and Supervisor.
• Create and maintain a range of crowd agents including bipeds, quadrupeds, and vehicles, built for efficient simulation across feature film production sequences.
• Apply and execute crowd behaviors on shots to the highest technical and artistic standards, resolving shot-specific challenges independently when they arise.
• Provide hands-on support and instruction to Crowd Animators, contributing to their technical growth within the production workflow.
• Give structured feedback to department TDs to drive the continued development of tools and workflows across the crowds pipeline.
• Stay current on methodologies and tools relevant to crowd simulation, procedural rigging, and the broader CG pipeline from assets through to lighting.

What You Bring

• 5 or more years of experience in the VFX or animation industries, with at least 3 years focused on animation production.
• Excellent working knowledge of the Houdini Crowd system, including agent setup and behavior networks in a production environment.
• Practical experience with Maya and Houdini in live production contexts, with knowledge of procedural rendering in Renderman.
• Credits on animated feature film production or comparable large-scale crowd simulation work.
• A deep understanding of the full CG pipeline, from asset creation through simulation, rendering, and lighting.
• High English proficiency required; Spanish language skills are a plus for working within the Madrid studio.

Why This Role

Skydance Media has built a reputation for large-scale animated and live-action feature film production, and this Madrid-based team operates at that same level of technical ambition. The Senior Crowds Technical Artist position carries real ownership over a critical department, with direct influence on how crowd tools and workflows develop across the production. For a technical artist looking to work at feature film scale with a team that takes pipeline craft seriously, this is a substantive role.

Apply now for the Senior Crowds Technical Artist position at Skydance Media and bring your crowd simulation expertise to a feature film production team in Madrid.