About One Man Studio

We partner with major AAA teams to ship real-time content. Senior, hands-on, fully remote.

The Role

Finish client-approved lighting blockouts/proxies into final, game-ready lighting at AAA shipping quality. You’ll work across the environment pod (and support character presentation), owning look, readability, and performance in Unreal—from gameplay spaces to hero shots—alongside the Lead 3D Artist and Principals.

What You’ll Do

Finish to final: Turn blockouts into shippable lighting using Unreal’s Lumen/RT or baked pipelines, reflection systems, light channels, and Post Process Volumes.
Readability & mood: Ensure clear player guidance, focus, and silhouette; lock exposure, contrast, and color for both exploration and combat.
Character presentation: Validate skin/eyes/hair under production lighting; set up simple turntables and presentation rigs for approvals.
Materials truthing: Catch roughness/albedo issues, specular spikes, and normal/bake problems that lighting reveals; push fixes or workarounds.
Performance: Profile and optimize (GPU cost, shadow map memory, screen cost, light counts); define scalable settings and fallback paths.
Cinematics & key moments: Light callouts, POIs, boss rooms, and brief in-Seq shots; maintain continuity with gameplay.
Tools & workflow: Maintain LUTs/grade, exposure curves, PPV presets, IES/Light Functions libraries; propose validators with Tech Art.
Reviews & iteration: Run quick lookdev passes, provide paintovers/refs, respond to client notes fast, and raise first-pass approvals.
Collaboration: Sync with Environment/Character art, VFX (overdraw/brightness balance), Design (telegraphy), and Audio (beats) to keep the picture cohesive.

Requirements

5+ years lighting real-time games; 1+ shipped AA/AAA title or equivalent live product.
Strong Unreal Engine lighting: dynamic/baked workflows, Lumen/RT familiarity, PPV, reflection captures/SSR, light channels, volumetrics/fog, shadows.
Confident with color grading, exposure, tone mapping, and LUT authoring; solid photography/cinematic fundamentals.
Performance-minded: comfortable profiling and hitting budgets while preserving intent.
Clear communicator; reliable in a remote, multi-time-zone setup.

Nice to Have

Sequencer experience (brief shots, camera moves, shot continuity).
HDR calibration, platform-specific grading, and accessibility/readability considerations.
Basic shader/material literacy to partner on fixes; scripting for utilities (Blueprint/Python).
ShotGrid/Jira hygiene; outsource/vendor collaboration.

Portfolio

Show final, in-engine Unreal lighting with succinct breakdowns: before/after passes, PPV/LUT notes, perf snapshots, and gameplay captures under production lighting. If we can’t see process and results, we can’t assess.

What Success Looks Like

High first-pass approvals from the client.
Spaces and characters are readable, on-style, and performant—no late surprises.
Reusable lighting presets and grades that speed the pod.

Senior Lighting Artist