Lighting Artist – Temporary Contract

Mikros Animation is hiring a Lighting Artist on a temporary contract basis in Montreal, Canada. This role sits within the 3D pipeline, responsible for designing and implementing lighting and shading solutions that feed directly into the Compositing department as final renders. It’s a good fit for a CG lighting professional who works well across departments and can hold their own technically while staying locked into a project’s visual direction.

About the Role

The Lighting Artist works inside the 3D animation pipeline at Mikros Animation, contributing to productions where visual consistency and render quality are held to a high standard from shot to final output. Day to day, this person is building and refining lighting setups in Houdini, addressing notes from dailies, and making sure renders integrate cleanly with composited CG elements. The role demands someone who can move between artistic problem-solving and technical optimization without losing pace on a production schedule.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and manage shot and sequence lighting setups in Houdini, working with rigor and autonomy through each stage of the VFX pipeline.
• Translate the project’s visual direction into coherent lighting that supports storytelling and reinforces depth across scenes.
• Optimize scene and render settings to reduce machine load while holding the quality bar expected in feature film production.
• Identify and resolve rendering artifacts or technical issues before submission, and turn around dailies notes quickly and accurately.
• Coordinate with Lighting, CG, and Compositing Supervisors to keep the artistic vision consistent across sequences.
• Document lighting setups and workflows to support knowledge sharing and clean handovers within the team.

What You Bring

• Solid production experience as a Lighting Artist in animation or VFX, with credits on feature film or episodic television preferred.
• Proficiency in Houdini as a primary lighting and rendering tool, including scene structure and versioning best practices.
• Working knowledge of shading, rendering optimization, and how lighting output integrates into a compositing workflow.
• Ability to provide accurate time estimates and flag technical blockers to production without waiting to be asked.
• Familiarity with QC processes, naming conventions, and department protocols in a structured post-production environment.

Why This Role

Mikros Animation has a strong track record in high-end animated feature film production, and this contract places you inside a team that treats craft and technical discipline as equally important. Montreal’s animation studio scene offers real peer-level collaboration, and the internal culture here supports ongoing learning through shared tools, scripts, and training initiatives. This is a contract position with clear scope, which suits artists who want focused production work without an open-ended commitment.

Apply now for the Lighting Artist contract role at Mikros Animation and bring your CG lighting experience to a production team that takes the craft seriously.