Digital Materials Artist

Role: Digital Materials Artist – Warrington

Salary: £38k- £40k per annum DOE

Working Hours: Monday to Friday 9am- 17:30pm

Benefits:

• Hybrid working 3 days onsite
• Potential Annual Bonus Scheme: Contribute to our success and get rewarded for it
• Growth and Training: Learn new skills and develop your career with us
• Leave: Enjoy a great holiday allowance, with the option to buy 5 extra days. Take advantage of our enhanced leave for Maternity, Paternity, Shared Parental, and Adoption, plus a paid volunteering day each year
• Discounts and savings at big brands like Sainsbury’s, ASOS, and IKEA
• Wellbeing Perks: Access healthcare services, an Employee Assistance Programme, and discounted gym memberships
• Pension and Savings: Join our Group Pension and Sharesave schemes
• Life Assurance & Sick Pay: Peace of mind with Life Assurance and Company Sick Pay

General overview:

We are seeking a highly skilled 3D Material & Shader Specialist to take ownership of our digital fabric library, with a strict focus on V-Ray rendering and render farm scalability. In this role, you will be responsible for creating, optimizing, and managing a massive, high-end library of digital upholstery. You will bridge the gap between technical shading and digital artistry, ensuring that every digital sofa, chair, and footstool looks as tactile and luxurious on a screen as it does in our showrooms, while also rendering flawlessly across our distributed pipeline, as well as optimizing and baking those complex shader networks into lightweight, performant formats (glTF/USDZ) for web and AR.

Responsibilities:

• Creating realistic PBR materials for furniture fabrics including linens, bouclés, velvets, leathers and synthetics.
• Building and refining V-Ray materials to accurately capture fabric textures and properties.
• Optimising materials for web, real-time 3D and AR platforms.
• Ensuring materials look consistent across CGI, websites and AR experiences.
• Using Substance 3D Designer to create and efficiently produce fabric variations.
• Supporting render farm workflows, troubleshooting material and texture issues.
• Working with commercial teams to colour-match digital fabrics against physical samples and maintain accuracy across platforms.

The ideal candidate:

• Minimum of 3 years specialised in technical art, shading, or PBR material authoring, with a portfolio centred on high-end product visualisation or VFX.
• Advanced technical proficiency in V-Ray (3ds Max or Maya). Comprehensive understanding of light transport, sampling math, and the ability to deconstruct and solve complex shading bottlenecks.
• Extensive experience managing complex scenes for network rendering via Backburner, with a focus on memory management and UNC pathing consistency.
• Proven experience using Adobe Substance 3D Designer and Substance 3D Painter to create and develop high-quality, realistic materials.
• Technical fluency within core DCC applications (3ds Max or Maya).
• A meticulous eye for detail, textile physics, scale, and the subtle nuances of colour and light interaction.
• Must be able to showcase photo realistic digital upholstery, demonstrating expert control over weave patterns, micro-surface qualities, and final high-fidelity V-Ray renders.

Don't let it discourage you if you don't have all of this experience, it's a guideline that will help you hit the ground running. If the role sounds like it would be a great fit for you and you're confident that it suits you, we'd love you to apply.