First, let us talk about the culture and benefits of the studio before the basic requirements of the role: 

What does it mean to work at our client’s office?

• Work-life balance: a work family that does not replace your family-family
• Flexible workday hours and work-from-home opportunities
• Time off when you need it: a wellness-first and family-first mindset
• High transparency and easy access to studio leadership
  

Benefits

• Generous medical, dental, vision, EAP, FSA, and both short & long-term disability
• Paid vacation time
• Paid sick time
• Paid holidays including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Matching 401(k) program
• Annual profit-sharing from Paradox Interactive
• Easy access off I-405 and free parking
• Skilled, passionate, and fun co-workers
• Pet-friendly office
  

What are the basics about the role?

We are actively looking for a Mid – Senior Technical Animator for an unannounced game. This is a turn-based combat game with creatures, humans, etc. for a fun experience. This role will be responsible for maintaining animation control systems, rigging, weighting, and retargeting pipelines and processed used by the animation team.

Okay, time for some bullet points:

• Design, implement, and maintain efficient character animation and rigging pipelines that meet and augment the creative goals of our projects.
• Supervise integration of animation assets into the game engine.
• Create and modify state machine logic and other animation control systems.
• Integrate appropriate real-time solutions such as dynamic bone chains, cloth, hair, IK, ragdoll, etc
• Troubleshoot and solve technical art production issues related to rigging and animation.
• Work with our engineering team to develop tools, scripts, and plugins as needed to streamline art workflows, and to source off-the shelf solutions when appropriate.
• Collaborate with and train artists on character pipeline tools.
• Strive to maximize the character art and animation team’s production performance and predictability through your work.
  

What do we need you to bring to the team to impact the studio?

• You have professional experience in the game industry with shipped 3D titles using Unity
• You have strong practical understanding of animation logic: node graphs, animation trees and similar engine editors and technology
• You know how to budget and design for performant animation systems without sacrificing overall visual quality.
• You’re comfortable implementing a full animation pipeline from end to end.
• You’re comfortable with scripting in Unity and Maya.
• You can give clear, actionable verbal and written art feedback that adds real value.
  

Let us talk brownie points. These are bonuses, but not required.

• Experience animating melee and armed combat.
• Experience organizing and running mocap shoots.
• Experience with facial rigging and animation.
• Motion Matching and physics-based animation systems.
• Experience with both keyframe and motion-capture animation.
• C# and Python coding experience.
• Experience with MotionBuilder
• Experience working with modular character creation systems.