You are a highly skilled Groom Artist with deep experience creating photo-realistic fur, hair, and feather grooms for hero creatures, quadrupeds, and digi-doubles. You have a strong understanding of animal anatomy, fur behavior, and how grooming interacts with deformation, simulation, and rendering. You are detail-oriented, artistic, and technically savvy– able to create grooms that hold up in close-ups while remaining efficient for production. You thrive in a collaborative pipeline, working closely with Creature, Rigging, CFX, Lookdev, and Lighting teams, and enjoy sharing knowledge, refining workflows, and pushing the quality bar for fur and hair assets. You are a problem-solver who can balance realism, aesthetics, and performance constraints, and you bring a proactive, communicative, and team-oriented mindset to every project.

What You’ll Do

Fur Grooming & Look Development (70%)

• Create high-quality, photo-real grooms for hero quadrupeds, creatures, and digi-doubles using Houdini.
• Develop physically accurate fur attributes including density, direction, clumping, frizz, noise, and region-based variation.
• Work with Lookdev to create shader-driven fur materials and ensure believable color, spec, translucency, melanin variations, and root/tip gradations.
• Ensure grooms behave predictably during deformation, simulation, and rendering, providing clean guides and well-organized groom structures.
• Prepare grooms for CFX and simulation workflows, including guide grooming, interpolation, masking, and attribute painting.
• Maintain consistency and fidelity of fur across close-ups, mid-range shots, and full-body hero renders.

Pipeline, Process & Collaboration (25%)

• Collaborate closely with Creature, Rigging, CFX, and Lookdev teams to ensure seamless integration of grooms across the pipeline.
• Provide clear feedback in groom reviews and participate in defining quality standards for fur and hair assets.
• Troubleshoot issues related to guide behavior, shading, simulation, render performance, and pipeline stability.
• Contribute to improvements in grooming workflows, tools, and best practices.
• Work with Lighting and Lookdev to ensure the groom renders consistently under various lighting conditions.

People & Cross-Team Support (5%)

• Share grooming techniques and best practices with peers and junior artists.
• Help elevate the studio’s groom quality bar through knowledge sharing and review participation.
• Communicate effectively with Production and Supervisors regarding task progress, risks, and technical requirements.

What You Bring

• 5+ years of professional VFX experience focused on grooming for episodics or features.
• Proven ability to create photo-real, hero-level fur grooms, preferably for quadrupeds.
• Expert proficiency in grooming tools such as Houdini Groom.
• Strong artistic understanding of animal anatomy, fur directionality, region-based variation, and sculptural detail.
• Experience collaborating with Lookdev on fur shaders and PBR-based hair/fur materials.
• Comfort working with CFX and Rigging teams, understanding how grooms interact with skinning and simulation workflows.
• Ability to debug and optimize grooms for performance without sacrificing realism.
• Strong communication and collaborative skills suitable for a fast-paced, multi-show environment.
• Scripting familiarity (Python, VEX, MEL) is a plus but not required.
• Groom lookdev and simulation experience is a plus. 

Although the job listing has Montreal listed, they are also looking for artists in Vancouver: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7406775616638787584/