3D Environment & Prop Artist in Unreal

About the role

Hidden Acorn is a new game studio based in the San Francisco Bay Area building our first title: a competitive, PvP real-time strategy game launching across all major platforms. We're a small, ambitious team and we are looking for talented, passionate people who'll build it with us from the ground up. Hidden Acorn is looking for an Environment & Prop Artist to build the world that surrounds our units. Buildings, terrain pieces, destructible structures, modular kits, props: the things that make a map feel like somewhere real. RTS environments live or die by modularity and visual clarity, and we're shipping cross-platform, so assets need to read fast, tile cleanly, and hold up under a top-down camera across a range of hardware specs. You'll work closely with the Creative Director to establish the visual language for our environments and own that pipeline from blockout to final asset in Unreal Engine 5.

Responsibilities

• Work with the Creative Director and concept artists to model buildings, fortifications, terrain assets, and props that establish and maintain the visual identity of our world
• Design and maintain modular kits that artists and designers can use to build maps quickly and consistently, without visual repetition
• Create textures using trim sheets, tiling materials, and unique bakes where budget allows, ensuring assets meet our quality bar across different hardware specs
• Set up and maintain assets in Unreal Engine 5, including imports, collision, LODs, material instances, and Nanite where appropriate, so they are ready to drop into maps
• Work closely with the Creative Director to maintain the visual language for environments: scale, color palette, and architectural style per faction
• Contribute to scene dressing and lighting passes for map readouts and marketing material
• Help document pipeline conventions so contractors and future hires can match the style

Requirements

• 3-5 years of environment or prop art experience with at least one shipped or near-shipped project
• Highly skilled at hard-surface modeling in Maya, Blender, or equivalent: clean topology, sensible polycount, and strong UV discipline
• Proficient with trim sheets and tiling texture workflows, with a clear understanding of when to use each and how to blend them effectively
• Strong understanding of modular design and how to build kits that are flexible without becoming incoherent
• Working knowledge of Unreal Engine 5 at a pipeline level: importing, material setup, collision, and LOD configuration
• Strong portfolio that includes architectural or structural work such as buildings, ruins, or fortifications, with clear readability at a distance
• Experience building assets specifically for RTS or strategy games
• Houdini for procedural asset generation or terrain tooling
• Terrain and landscape work in Unreal Engine
• Lighting and post-process experience for environment polish passes
• Substance Designer for custom tiling material authoring

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