3D Environment Asset Artist at Santa Barbara Games Santa Barbara, CA

Details:

• Start date:
  
  Jan
• Fully Remote Position

At Santa Barbara Games, we’re in stealth mode building a stylized, session-based survival roguelite set in a dark, mystical forest. We’re a small indie team looking for an Environment Artist to focus purely on creating beautiful, painterly stylized props for our world.

This role is about making great-looking assets—trees, foliage, ruins, shrines, and forest props—that fit a cohesive, hand-crafted aesthetic. You won’t be responsible for level layout, scene dressing, or world composition. Our art lead and level designer will handle placement and integration.

Your job is to deliver high-quality assets that are rich in mood, shape, and character, and that hold up under close inspection.

• Create painterly stylized props:
  Author trees, foliage, rocks, ruins, shrines, campsites, and forest props.
• Focus on asset quality:
  Push shape language, color, texture, and detail to deliver visually striking assets.
• Match established style:
  Work within a defined painterly, stylized art direction and maintain consistency across the asset library.
• Produce clean, game-ready assets:
  Deliver optimized meshes, UVs, and textures ready for engine integration.
• Iterate on feedback:
  Refine assets based on art direction notes and visual polish passes.
• Stay scoped:
  No level layout, no scene dressing, no lighting setup—just excellent assets.

• A portfolio showcasing strong stylized or painterly prop and environment asset work.
• Excellent fundamentals in shape language, color, and texture.
• Experience creating hand-painted or painterly textures, or equivalent stylized workflows.
• Comfort working from reference, paintovers, and clear art direction.
• Strong asset hygiene: clean topology, sensible UVs, and consistent texel density.
• Ability to hit quality bars consistently across many assets.

• Experience shipping a PC game.
• Familiarity with Unity asset requirements (even if you’re not placing assets).
• Experience creating organic props (trees, foliage, rocks).
• Interest in stylized, dark fantasy, or folk-horror aesthetics.
• Enjoyment of painterly styles (Over the Garden Wall, darker Ghibli influences).