Digital Matte Painters

Mill Film is a newly launched visual effects studio with locations in Adelaide - Australia, Bangalore - India and Montreal - Canada, working on VFX for feature films and episodic content. With talent diversity and equality at the heart of Mill Film’s culture, we want to inspire the next generation of visual effects artists, to create a dynamic pool of talent and work with the latest technologies on ground breaking productions.

Digital Matte Painters (DMPs) or Environment TDs are responsible for painting and/or building photo-real digital environments, elements and textures for matching into live action plates, to stand on their own as DMP plates or to be used in a 3D environment and passed through the pipeline. It’s a cross-discipline role that requires abilities in one or more CG techniques, including modeling, texturing, shading, lighting, look development and compositing.

A DMP/EnvTD requires flexibility, being able to identify the best approach for matching the quality of the plate photography. This would on occasion require working alone on a shot, taking it from start to finish, but would also require a strong teamwork mentality, being able to share techniques and materials with other DMP/env TD’s and work alongside other departments like assets, lighting and comp to ensure that shots are delivered to the highest standard and meet the requirements from the supervision team.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Assembling models, digital matte paintings, textures, projections and lights into a CG scene for rendering.
• Creating models, textures, shaders and photo-realistic digital matte paintings, either from little-to-no material or from digital stills turned over by the client or collaborating with specialists in those disciplines as required.
• Working with a shot Compositor to assemble renders and projections in a compositing application.
• Assisting with and developing the look of a shot, asset or sequence in liaison with the supervision team.

You would ideally possess the following qualifications:

• Previous experience in Feature Film on a VFX environment with working knowledge of Linux.
• Proven experience developing photo-real environments. Building cities, landscapes, foliage, debris, rocks. Procedural and painted texturing, creation of wear, erosion masks. Manual or procedural layout and scattering.
• Ideally a thorough working knowledge of Photoshop, Maya, Katana, Renderman and Nuke and experience with of a range of other VFX industry software like: Mari, Substance Designer/Painter, Houdini, Zbrush, SpeedTree, Vue, Terragen, Mudbox.
• Experience working with shoot data including photographic and reference data like textures, HDRIs, photogrammetry and Lidar scans.
• Experience in modelling, texturing, layout, LookDev, lighting and digital matte painting for live-action feature film projects.
• Strong knowledge of camera focal lengths, a good sense of composition and an understanding of different output requirements.
• A strong knowledge of how to combine 2D and 3D elements, multi-camera projection setups and general knowledge of 2.5D VFX processes and production pipelines.
• Strong knowledge and understanding of the natural world (geology, geography and meteorology) and architecture (design and engineering).

Plus:

• Experience with procedural city generation and scattering tools an advantage
• Knowledge of Mel and/or Python

Mill Film builds inclusion and diversity into the foundation of the studio. We believe that inclusion and diversity are the solution to delivering excellence in creative VFX for our clients. We foster a culture of respectful candour, where artists, production and technologists come together to build a talent community devoted to realising industry leading VFX solutions for feature and episodic content for major Studios.