Technical Animator//Rigger-Senior-MGS-343 Industries-Halo Job

Job Category: Software Engineering: Creative
Location: United States, WA, Redmond
Job ID: 702334 7318
Product: Xbox Gaming
Division: Entertainment & Devices Division

Technical Animator/Rigger-Senior

Microsoft Game Studios' 343 Industries is looking for exceptional talent to help breathe a fresh vision into a new Halo experience. Teamwork, innovation, attention-to-detail and unbridled passion are characteristics we look for in all of our technical artists. If you are a top talent looking for an exciting, high profile project to challenge you, this is where you need to be.

We are looking for a highly-qualified candidate for the position of Technical Artist who specializes in rigging and technical animation. The Technical Artist will play a significant role in establishing and maintaining the production pipelines. The ideal candidate will be able to work collaboratively with the Animation, Design and Development teams to help bring our story alive and push the medium forward.
Job responsibilities

• Eliminate technical obstacles from the animation team's day-to-day workflows.
• Proactively identify new technologies and techniques that will improve the quality of the animation and/or game.
• Build rigs, tools and procedural rigging systems that support animators and runtime engine requirements.
• Collaborate with Art and Engineering to develop tools, procedures and motion blending systems.
• Anticipate dependencies, inefficiencies and risks within the project and propose mitigation or contingency plans as appropriate.
• Find solutions to production challenges as they arise.
• Collaborate with Art and Test teams to raise run-time art content quality and efficiency in engine.
• Establish guidelines and write process documents for art content creation.
• Create and maintain documentation for the tools used in art content creation.
• Support and train Artists using internally developed rigs and tools.

Required Qualifications/Skills

• 5+ years of experience on commercial film/game projects or related fields in real-time graphics.
• In depth knowledge of major art packages
• Strong understanding of Maya and MEL
• Proactive problem solver, able to devise creative, efficient and user-friendly solutions for a wide variety of technical challenges.
• Task driven, self-motivated, works well under deadlines.
• Experience rigging a variety of characters and props, including facial animation systems.
• Understanding of animation workflows, tasks, objectives and challenges
• Ability to design, develop and maintain procedural rigging systems
• Familiarity with motion capture data, motion planning, and animation retargeting
• Proven ability to work well with both animation teams and engineering teams.
• Excellent communication, time-management and organizational skills.
• Works well under deadlines, able to work within tight deadlines and deliver requests with a quick turn-around time.
• Familiarity with source control software.

Desired skills

• Strong understanding of Maya C++ API, Maya Python API, Python.NET http://Python.NET>, and/or C#.
• Experience with MotionBuilder, Havok, Endorphin or similar specialized motion systems.
• Several shipped film/game titles.
• Extensive experience with production level content pipelines.
• Experience with motion blending systems and motion state machine authoring.
• Muscle based deformation, wrinkle simulation, constraint algorithms and inverse kinematic solvers.
• Animation and or modeling skills.

*To consider similar job openings within Microsoft Game Studios on MS Career, use keyword: MGS

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