Technical Artist: Rigging
Rockstar Games
- Oakville, ON
- Permanent
- Full-time
- We design, create, and maintain highly complex deformation systems for characters, animals and vehicles that bring our 3D assets to life.
- We support rigging pipelines, including investigations for improvement of facial rig and animation solving solutions.
- We work with Technical Artists to maintain and improve our proprietary animation tools.
- We bring innovation to dynamic art pipelines through rigs, secondary motion setups, and evolving our tools and workflows - from asset creation to its visualization in the engine.
- We collaborate and communicate with other departments such as Tools and Code teams to improve our authoring workflows and animation/graphics systems in runtime.
- Build, test, and maintain body and face rigs, skinning, and secondary motion setups for a variety of 3D assets.
- Use proprietary system to create and export constraints, custom deformers, and secondary motion to the game engine.
- Work closely with animators, automation, and other TAs to create tools and improve pipelines that ensure the best results from our production workflows and processes.
- Support facial pipeline and be heavily involved in face assets from motion capture.
- Work with the team organizing, documenting, and maintaining libraries of rig modules that can be shared by a large team of riggers through multiple projects.
- Support and help create production tools to support new pipelines and future tech.
- Staying current with latest technologies/research ongoing in the field to help keep our dynamic art visuals at the cutting-edge regarding motion and deformation.
- Relevant experience in the game industry as a Character Rigger, Technical Animator, or similar/related position.
- A demo reel and online portfolio that demonstrates exceptional skills creating motion controls for animation, complex deformation and skinning of body and face of characters and creatures.
- Strong Python programming skills, and a 3D math background.
- Experience creating tools for Rigging and Animation.
- Experience using source control software (i.e. Perforce, Git).
- Strong communication, self-management, and organizational skills.
- Professional experience developing pipelines and creating tools is highly advantageous.
- Experience programming C++ plugins for Motionbuilder, Maya, 3DS Max, or similar DCCs.
- Experience using other game engines (e.g. Unreal/Unity or proprietary tech).
- Knowledge of current facial capture approaches, FACS poses, facial blend shape rigs, feature detection, etc.
- Experience using a solver based face animation package (Dynamixyz or Faceware).
- Professional experience as an Artist or Animator in games.