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Technical Animator

About the role

You will enter the team as a Technical Animator, in charge of implementing manual and procedural animations in the Unity3D engine, as well as ingame cinematics will be asked to create or modify 3D rigs to fit the needs of the Animation team. You will work with the Lead Developer, Lead Technical Artist, Lead Artist, and Lead Game Designer to develop features and tools related to animation implementation as required by the project. Finally, you will be a pipeline supervisor for the production of 3D assets, to ensure that the team is implementing optimizations and best practices.

Responsibilities

  • Work with the Lead 3D Artist to ensure all animated assets fulfill technical requirements and follow best practices.
  • Rig 3D characters and assets in Blender, and 2D puppets either in Blender or the Unity3D engine.
  • Generate procedural animations using a wide range of tools (splines, Vector Maths, trigonometric functions, etc.)
  • Implement animations into the engine following the guidelines of the Development team.
  • Maintain and generate tools for the implementation of runtime cinematics, that may be used by the Art and Design teams.
  • Develop animation-related features and tools following Unity optimization best practices.

Required skills and qualifications

  • 3 years working in the videogames industry using the Unity Engine: at least 1.5 in some rigging or animation implementation capacity.
  • Thorough knowledge of the 3D asset creation and animation pipelines, and of best practices and optimizations for videogame assets, rigs and animations.
    • This includes thorough knowledge of file formats and export settings involved in these pipelines.
  • Working knowledge of Unity best practices.
  • Portfolio showcasing solid rigging skills in Blender and/or Maya (SOYB*).
  • Working knowledge of C# using the UnityEngine.
  • Examples of procedural animation using 3D Mathematics and Unity.
  • Examples of animations implemented using the Animator module
    • Try to show samples of State Machines, Blend Trees, Layers, Avatars, Avatar Masks and IK targets.
  • Examples of camera animation using Cinemachine.

Ideal skills and qualifications

  • At least one year working as a full-time rigger in the videogame industry.
  • Portfolio showcasing solid rigging skills in Blender.
  • Working knowledge in Python for Blender.
  • Working knowledge of shaders and materials in Unity (sufficient to implement animations).
  • Working knowledge of particle systems in Unity (sufficient to implement animations.
  • Can prototype game features in Unity to test animations.
  • Experience with Unity’s profiling tools.
  • Has implemented motion capture animation libraries.
  • Team-oriented, with good written and verbal communication skills.
  • English intermediate proficiency.

Nice to have’s

  • Theoretical knowledge of 3D Computer Graphics.
  • Formal training in Programming (online course, diploma, related degree, etc).
  • Experience in motion capture and XR.

Things to look for in rigging portfolio

  • Clean hierarchy in bones and rig objects.
  • Proper skinning in character mesh.
  • Intuitive controllers.
  • Staple features for humanoid: IK/FK switches, foot rolls, master controllers.
  • Blendshapes/shape keys.
  • Driven keys/drivers.
  • Blendshape-based facial rigging (limited amount of facial bones).
  • Common but optional features (auto squash/stretch, IK/FK snapping, tail controllers, selection pickers) are a plus.
  • Specialty features (space switches, hybrid IK/FK, broken rigs, simulated elements) are a great plus.
  • Self-made tools are a great plus.

Monthly salary

$ 18,000 – $20,000 MXN

Send us your CV to contact@1simplegame.com