Lighting Artist – Temporary Contract

Rodeo FX is hiring a Lighting Artist on a temporary contract basis in Montreal, Canada. This role sits within the 3D department and is responsible for designing and delivering final renders to the Compositing team, with lighting and shading solutions built to match each project’s visual direction. It suits a CG lighting professional who is comfortable working autonomously inside a structured VFX pipeline and holding their own in cross-department conversations about image quality.

About the Role

The Lighting Artist works within Rodeo FX’s 3D department, contributing to VFX production across feature film and episodic television projects. Day to day, this means building shot-specific lighting setups in Houdini, troubleshooting rendering issues before submission, and attending dailies to turn around notes quickly. The work lives at the intersection of technical problem-solving and visual craft, with the Compositing department as your primary downstream collaborator.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and refine lighting setups in Houdini tailored to the specific needs of individual shots and sequences within the production schedule.
• Deliver final renders to the Compositing department that integrate cleanly with CG elements and hold up under QC review.
• Optimize scene files to reduce render farm load while preserving the visual quality expected at this level of VFX production.
• Identify and resolve rendering artifacts or technical issues prior to submission, and address dailies notes with speed and accuracy.
• Collaborate directly with Lighting, CG, and Compositing Supervisors to ensure lighting choices support the overall visual direction of each sequence.
• Document setups and workflows in Confluence to support task handovers and shared team knowledge across the department.

What You Bring

• Demonstrated experience as a Lighting Artist within a professional VFX pipeline, with credits on feature film or episodic television productions.
• Proficiency in Houdini as a primary lighting and rendering environment, with solid working knowledge of shading workflows.
• Ability to read and execute against a project’s visual direction with minimal supervision.
• Familiarity with naming conventions, scene structure, and versioning protocols standard to a studio post-production environment.
• A track record of communicating production delays or technical blockers proactively and accurately estimating shot timelines.

Why This Role

Rodeo FX has built a reputation across the VFX industry for work on high-profile feature film and television projects, with studios in Montreal, Los Angeles, and beyond. This Lighting Artist contract offers direct exposure to a full-scale VFX pipeline and supervisors who are active practitioners, not just managers. For a lighting professional looking to deepen their craft within a structured and experienced production environment, this is a substantive engagement.

Apply now for the Lighting Artist contract at Rodeo FX and bring your rendering work to a production team that takes image quality seriously.