Senior Lookdev Artist – Multiple Positions

Job Position(s): Senior Lookdev Artist - Multiple Positions

Rodeo FX is hiring for multiple Senior Lookdev Artist positions at their Montreal, Canada studio. This role sits at the intersection of texturing, shading, and rendering, where the artist is responsible for developing the final surface appearance of 3D assets before they move into lighting and compositing in the VFX pipeline. It suits a mid-to-senior level artist who has shipped assets on feature film or episodic television productions and knows how to move efficiently between creative problem-solving and technical execution.

About the Role

The Senior Lookdev Artist works within a department that bridges texturing and lighting, building physically plausible shaders and delivering lighting-ready assets that hold up through the full post-production workflow. Day to day, this means producing turntables, AOV breakdowns, and benchmark renders for dailies review, while coordinating with lighting and compositing to ensure assets read correctly in the final composite. The role carries real ownership over asset quality and requires someone comfortable fielding feedback from supervision and integrating it quickly.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop complete looks by combining textures, shaders, and validation lighting that meet the specific requirements of each production.
• Design physically plausible shaders optimized for VFX pipeline compatibility, covering displacement, color space management, and tiling considerations.
• Produce turntables, AOV passes, and benchmark renders to support dailies and supervision reviews.
• Identify and resolve texture or shading issues that could create bottlenecks for lighting and compositing downstream.
• Work with photographic references, scans, digital painting, and procedural materials to achieve high levels of surface realism, including micro-detail and variation.
• Contribute to workflow improvements between texturing and lookdev, and share technical knowledge on shaders and materials across the team.

What You Bring

• Several years of lookdev or texturing experience on feature film or high-end episodic television productions.
• Strong working knowledge of physically based rendering and shader construction in industry-standard renderers such as Arnold, RenderMan, or V-Ray.
• Proficiency with tools like Mari, Substance Painter, and Nuke, with an understanding of how lookdev assets feed into compositing.
• A trained eye for surface materials, with the ability to interpret and enhance visual references using sound artistic judgment.
• Comfort working within a structured VFX pipeline and delivering assets on schedule under supervision review cycles.

Why This Role

Rodeo FX has built a reputation as a serious VFX studio with credits across major streaming and theatrical productions, and the Montreal facility is one of the larger and more established studios in the Canadian market. Multiple openings means real team depth, not a single backfill hire, which generally signals active production volume. For a Senior Lookdev Artist looking to work on high-complexity assets within a structured and collaborative pipeline, this is a substantive opportunity.

Apply now for the Senior Lookdev Artist role at Rodeo FX and take the next step in your VFX career.