Job Description

With studios in Los Angeles, Munich and Shanghai, Designworks provides full-service design solutions for premium brands worldwide. Our history spans nearly forty years and continues to earn numerous awards and industry accolades along the way.

Designworks thrives in a climate of true cross-fertilization, advancing its observations, research, and experiences from multiple industries to create new solutions that innovate rather than merely reinforcing the status quo. We serve as the internal-think tank for our parent company, BMW Group, and consult for a roster of external clients that includes many of the World’s most renowned and respected brands. Founded in 1972 in a small studio in Malibu, California, and acquired by BMW Group in 1995, today Designworks pairs the pragmatism and resources of a global company while retaining the nimble, independent spirit and perspective that’s true to our roots. Designworks depends upon the creativity and design excellence of our team members.

The Lead Visualization Designer is at the forefront of communicating our design vision (the best way to predict the future is to create it) through photoreal, cinematic and immersive media presentation experiences. The goal is to exceed BMW Group and Third Party Client experiences for visually compelling and emotionally engaging storytelling; a crucial part of the next steps in developing our Visual Storytelling capability. Depending on needs develop and set visualization standards for ED and 3rd Party projects. The role contributes to DW leadership in visualization and storytelling technology: including virtual reality, augmented reality, interactive visualization and media; by collaborating with in-house talent, BMW ED resources and external industry expertise. The Lead Visualization Designer will be working across all programs (BMW and 3rd Party, ID, UI and motion graphics) and collaborating across DW global studios.

Responsibilities:

• Ability to communicate via different tools, such as sketch and storyboards, animatics and previz. Master of building shaders, lighting, and environments.
• Team and process-oriented player, able to clearly communicate and collaborate across the design workflow, developing close working partnerships with designers, modelers, strategists, creative directors and directors.
• Create visualization workflow, schedule and deliverables and align with design process.
• Work with the Creative Directors and Designer to co-create the narrative, storyboard and art direction.
• Manage and grow a universal library of assets, resources and knowledge. Provide visualization guidance and advice to help designers improve their own renderings and adopt movies as a presentation medium and training.
• Set up and maintain with IT render farm and support IT Manager with the IT strategy for visualization. Explore new visualization technologies through interactivity, virtual and augmented reality. Constantly search for and explore new tools, including an aptitude for learning new software.
• Grow knowledge and skill by experimentation with storytelling elements, such as visual narrative and storyboarding, camera motion and effects, music and timing. Future growth beyond technical skills into field of art direction.
• Attend CGI and visualization conferences in different industries, grow knowledge and bring back learnings to DW.
• Work closely with CMF team to capture design intent and help develop the digital CMF library and practice.
• Balance between technical expertise and creativity; working with Creative Directors to co-create the storyboard of art direction, generate and produce the final media deliverable.
• The Visualization Specialist will have the technical expertise and experience to generate still, animated and real-time rendering. A generalist level of 3D animation and cinematic effects is required. 

Minimum Qualifications

• 7 to 10 year experience in visualization
• Good communicator and collaborator, multi-tasker, problem solver, with perseverance and a desire to learn and grow an expert in the design visualization field.
• In depth knowledge of VRED and other industry standard modeling, rendering and compositing software.
• Aptitude for learning new tools, software and technology.
• Must have proven technical skills in a diverse software toolset, such as VRED Design/Pro, Unreal Engine, Vray, Maya, After Effects, Nuke, Houdini, or industry equivalent.
• Must be experienced across visualization pipeline with a focus animation, compositing and editing, and sound. Ability to learn latest software’s and plug ins.