Established in 2004, Lakshya Digital - a Keywords Studio - is the largest interactive entertainment and game development services studio in South Asia. Our main production studios are in India, and we maintain satellite studios in Europe, North America, and Japan.
We're looking for a talented Senior Hair Artist to join our team and contribute to the creation of high-quality digital characters for an exciting AAA title.
Working closely with the client's character art team, you'll be responsible for creating realistic, performant, and visually compelling hair and fur assets that meet the project's artistic vision and technical requirements. You'll collaborate with Character Artists, Technical Artists, Art Directors, and production teams to ensure grooms are delivered to the highest quality while integrating seamlessly into the game's pipeline.
This role is ideal for someone with a strong artistic eye, deep technical knowledge of real-time hair workflows, and a passion for creating believable digital characters.
Job Overview:
What You'll Do- Create high-quality real-time hair, fur, eyebrows, eyelashes, facial hair, and other grooming assets for hero and supporting characters.
- Develop hair grooms that faithfully capture the intended style, silhouette, and personality of each character.
- Collaborate closely with Character Artists and Art Directors to achieve the desired visual quality and artistic direction.
- Optimise hair assets to meet performance, memory, and platform requirements without compromising visual fidelity.
- Integrate and refine hair assets within the game engine, ensuring they function correctly with shading, simulation, and animation systems.
- Work alongside Technical Artists to resolve technical challenges relating to grooming workflows, shaders, simulation, and rendering.
- Maintain consistency across multiple characters while adapting to a variety of hairstyles and art styles.
- Troubleshoot and resolve issues relating to deformation, physics, LODs, and asset implementation.
- Contribute to the continuous improvement of grooming workflows, documentation, and production pipelines.
RequirementsWhat We're Looking For
- Significant professional experience as a Hair Artist, Groom Artist, or Character Artist specialising in hair for AAA console or PC titles.
- Strong portfolio demonstrating realistic or highly stylised real-time hair creation across a range of characters.
- Excellent understanding of hair grooming principles, shape, flow, layering, and silhouette.
- Experience with industry-standard grooming tools such as XGen, Ornatrix, Houdini, Blender Hair, or equivalent.
- Experience authoring real-time hair cards and/or strand-based hair depending on project requirements.
- Strong understanding of hair textures, shaders, materials, transparency, and rendering techniques.
- Experience implementing hair assets within modern game engines such as Unreal Engine or Unity.
- Good understanding of optimisation techniques for real-time character rendering.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively within multidisciplinary and distributed teams.
- Self-motivated, organised, and capable of managing work independently.
- Experience shipping one or more AAA titles featuring high-quality digital characters.
- Experience with strand-based grooming workflows in Unreal Engine 5.
- Knowledge of hair simulation, cloth simulation, and character rigging workflows.
- Experience creating fur or creature grooms.
- Familiarity with scan-based character pipelines and physically based rendering workflows.
- Experience mentoring artists or contributing to grooming standards and best practices.
Studio: Keywords Studios
Location: Canada, US
Area of Work: Art Services
Service: Create
Employment Type: Contract
Working Pattern: Full Time, Remote
Skills Required
- Significant professional experience as a Hair Artist, Groom Artist, or Character Artist specialising in hair for AAA console or PC titles
- Strong portfolio demonstrating real-time hair creation (realistic or stylised) across a range of characters
- Excellent understanding of hair grooming principles: shape, flow, layering, and silhouette
- Experience with grooming tools such as XGen, Ornatrix, Houdini, or Blender Hair
- Experience authoring real-time hair cards and/or strand-based hair
- Strong understanding of hair textures, shaders, materials, transparency, and rendering techniques
- Experience implementing hair assets within modern game engines such as Unreal Engine or Unity
- Good understanding of optimisation techniques for real-time character rendering
- Excellent communication skills and ability to work effectively within multidisciplinary and distributed teams
- Self-motivated, organised, and capable of managing work independently
- Experience shipping one or more AAA titles featuring high-quality digital characters
- Experience with strand-based grooming workflows in Unreal Engine 5
- Knowledge of hair simulation, cloth simulation, and character rigging workflows
- Experience creating fur or creature grooms
- Familiarity with scan-based character pipelines and physically based rendering workflows
- Experience mentoring artists or contributing to grooming standards and best practices
What We Do
Keywords Studios is an international technical and creative services provider to the global video games industry and beyond. We bring to life digital content that entertains, connects, challenges and educates people worldwide. Established in 1998, and now with more than 65 facilities in 22 countries strategically located in Asia, the Americas, Australia and Europe, we provide integrated art creation, marketing services, software engineering, testing, localization, audio and customer care services across more than 50 languages and 16 games platforms to a blue-chip client base of more than 950 clients across the globe.
