Lead Technical Character Artist | North America | Europe

What we are looking for:

We are looking for a talented Lead Technical Character Artist to join our team. You will manage and work with the team to define, develop, and maintain character pipelines, lead the way for the most effective workflows in Maya and Unreal rigging arena. The Lead Technical Character Artist works closely with Art Director, Lead Character Artist, and Animation Director to understand and meet deformation target quality and movement expectations. You will lead Character Technical Artists, Riggers, and work with outsourcing partners. You will work with several other departments such as Art, Animation, Production, Engineering and QA to create and release the best possible and optimized assets. You will work on rigging, skinning, procedural motion in unreal, control rig in unreal, rigid bodies, cloth simulations, facial setup, RBFs and more.

Requirements

What we will do together:

• Gatekeep technical aspects of character production: rigging, tools, deformations & simulations in our characters, weapons, and creatures.
• Find creative ways to breathe life into our characters through secondary motion, ensuring optimization and high performance.
• Design & develop workflows to meet character deadlines and quality bar.
• Work with the Riggers, Character Artists, and other Technical Artists to develop and mentor best practices for our character pipeline.
• Work with RBFs and procedural rigs in Maya and Unreal to set high-quality character runtime, but optimized deformations.
• Create Control Rigs both in Maya and Unreal Engine
• Create Control Rigs in Unreal for Procedural motion, and full and semi-procedural animation.
• Lead and mentor other Riggers and Character Technical artists.
• Provide strong Rigging support for the Animation and Art department.
• Work with outsourcing partners and set up successful workflows for external development.
• Supervising and training less experienced colleagues

What you will bring:

• Minimum five years of experience in the game industry and 2 released game projects.
• Released Unreal Engine Game as Technical Artist, Rigger, or Technical Animator.
• Impressive mix of Rigging and Tooling skills both in Maya and Unreal
• Experience and strong focus on Unreal Engine Control Rig usage.
• Strong understanding of Optimized Secondary Motion on characters for multiple platforms.
• Experience in Rigid Bodies setups, Chaos Cloth simulations and Anim Dynamics
• Excitement for dynamic characters

Benefits

Interested… a bit about Escape Velocity:

Escape Velocity is a team of passionate, talented developers working at a studio that offers excellent benefits and what we believe is a fantastic project. But that doesn’t make us unique. What does make us special? We value the time, energy, and talent of our players and our colleagues. We want every hour spent developing and playing our games to be an incredibly rewarding and worthwhile use of your time. To that end, we are fully remote and support team members nearly anywhere in the world. We prioritize honesty, even when that means sharing bad news. We strive to give everyone autonomy so they can determine how best to work and play, and we care more about what you bring to the game and studio than how many hours you’re clocking. We believe in constant improvement across all areas – from the game itself to our production design – and are constantly re-evaluating how we spend our time to ensure that we’re not wasting yours and we’re all always working on the most important things. Finally (and perhaps most importantly) we’re dedicated to building a culture of play, which not only makes us better game makers, but also strengthens the bonds between us all.

How to apply:

Click apply and complete an application along with a Resume / CV. If we would like to move forward with your application, a member of the Recruiting Team will reach out to you and guide you through our process.

Escape Velocity is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to hiring, promoting, and compensating employees based on their qualifications and demonstrated ability to perform job responsibilities.

Applications will be considered regardless of age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, belief, race, or any other protected category.