Lead Material Artist (Character/Wardrobe) I Chef.fe d’équipe Artiste Matériaux (Personnage / Vêtements)

Job Position(s): Lead Material Artist (Character/Wardrobe) I Chef.fe d'équipe Artiste Matériaux (Personnage / Vêtements)

NBCUniversal is hiring a Lead Material Artist (Character/Wardrobe) based in Montréal, Québec for an ambitious interactive open-world experience in development at the studio. This role sits within the character art department and owns the full material pipeline for skin, fabric, and surface treatments across hero characters and large-scale population systems. It suits a senior technical artist who has shipped character materials at scale in animation or game-adjacent production environments and is ready to set standards rather than follow them.

About the Role

The Lead Material Artist (Character/Wardrobe) works directly with the Associate Art Director of Characters and cross-disciplinary teams to ensure every material asset integrates cleanly into the production pipeline, from individual hero builds to crowd simulation systems. Day-to-day work involves defining material creation guidelines, reviewing artist output for consistency and fidelity, and solving technical constraints without sacrificing visual quality. This is a production-facing lead position, not a purely hands-on artist role, though strong craft is expected.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain character material pipeline standards covering skin shading, fabric simulation, and surface detail for both hero and background population characters.
• Author physically based materials in Substance Painter, Substance Designer, or equivalent tools that meet the project’s real-time rendering requirements.
• Review and provide structured feedback on material work produced by the broader character art team, ensuring consistency across the full character roster.
• Partner with rigging, character TD, and lighting teams to troubleshoot material behavior across different rendering and lighting conditions in the VFX pipeline.
• Develop scalable material workflows that allow high-quality results to be achieved efficiently across large character populations without redundant asset creation.
• Document material systems and mentor mid-level and junior material artists to build consistent craft across the department.

What You Bring

• Five or more years of material or look development experience in animation production, game development, or a comparable real-time or VFX pipeline environment.
• Demonstrated credits on shipped titles or produced projects with character-heavy material work at a lead or senior level.
• Proficiency in Substance Painter, Substance Designer, and familiarity with real-time rendering engines such as Unreal Engine.
• Experience building and documenting material pipelines, not just executing within existing ones.
• Strong understanding of physically based rendering principles as applied to organic surfaces, textiles, and layered costume materials.

Why This Role

NBCUniversal brings together the production resources of Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, and a global studio infrastructure that few companies can match, giving this project access to meaningful institutional support. The Montréal studio has built a track record in character-focused production work, and this role sits at a point in the project where pipeline decisions made now will shape the entire character art output. For a lead-level material artist ready to own a discipline end to end, the scope here is genuine.

Apply now for the Lead Material Artist (Character/Wardrobe) position at NBCUniversal and bring your character material expertise to a production built to last.