Technical Animator - Vicarious Visions

Job Description

Technical Animator

As a Technical Animator, you will be involved with anything that moves in the game. You will be instrumental in the creation of our stunning visuals for our AAA titles. Technical Animators are expected to support many development workflows while implementing several types of content. As a game studio that's been around for 3 decades, Vicarious Visions has a vibrantly colorful and prestigiously successful past of guitar-playing, pro-skating, and Wumpa fruit-hoarding. As a new member of the Blizzard family, we also have an exhilarating future ahead of us. We are more excited than ever to join in the making of Blizzard franchises that are known and treasured around the world.

Vicarious Visions is wholly owned by Activision Blizzard. To learn more about our studio, please visit us at www.vvisions.com and @VvisionsStudio on Twitter. This is a full-time position at our office in Albany, New York.

Priorities can often change in a fast-paced environment like ours, so this role includes, but is not limited to the following:

Responsibilities:
• Work closely with Animators to maintain and improve our proprietary animation tools
• Adapt and maintain aspects of in-game character mechanics and handling
• Create and modify character/object rigs in Maya
• Implement procedural content in engine, such as cloth and physics
• Proactively identify problems with workflows, dependencies, and performance
• Collaborate with Art, Animation, Engineering, and Design teams to integrate animation features
• Act as the first line of defense when technical issues arise with animated objects/characters

Requirements:
• An understanding of the concepts of animation content creation and in-game implementation
• Proficiency in rigging and animation in Maya
• Strong understanding of runtime animation systems such as state machines, IK, animation layering
• Experience with Python scripting
• Driven to solve technical challenges across many aspects of game development

You'll really get noticed with these upgrades:
• Experience working with capturing and retargeting Motion Capture Data
• Experience debugging export pipelines from DCC to engine
• Understanding of memory, frame and bone count limits, and budgets
• Familiarity with PySide/Qt, C++, C#, Lua
• Experience with facial animation, facial motion capture, and/or facial tracking
Our studio, located in beautiful upstate New York, provides developers a safe, warm environment to hone their skills and become leaders of their craft. Creativity and innovation are cornerstones of our practice, and we nurture new ideas from all of our people. Crucially, we are a family of uniquely individual voices, and we have fostered a culture of diversity and inclusivity. We thrive on collaboration, respect, and fun. Join us!

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-r0y0xm-18-116-63-236-42 in your application.