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3D Animator

NZ Game Studio
3 hours ago
Full-time
Remote friendly (Auckland, New Zealand)
Worldwide
$34 - $55 NZD hourly
Animator

Key Responsibilities

  • Clean up and polish full-body motion capture performances to production-ready quality.
  • Clean up and refine facial motion capture, including expressions, lip-sync, mouth shapes, eye movement, blinking and common capture artifacts.
  • Combine full-body and facial motion capture into believable and consistent character performances.
  • Create and refine gameplay animation, including locomotion, walks, runs, sprints, starts, stops, turns, pivots and transitions.
  • Identify and correct common mocap issues including foot sliding, incorrect foot contacts, jitter, unnatural weight transfer and retargeting artifacts.
  • Retarget animation across different character rigs and proportions.
  • Implement and validate character animation within Unreal Engine.
  • Review animation quality in-engine and make adjustments based on real-time playback and gameplay requirements.
  • Work with animation tools and pipelines to prepare and maintain production-ready animation libraries.
  • Contribute to the development and improvement of animation workflows and best practices.
  • Provide guidance and feedback to other artists where required.

Job Requirements

  • 2+ years of professional experience as an Animator or similar role.
  • Strong professional experience with 3D character animation, preferably using Maya.
  • Strong experience with full-body motion capture cleanup and polishing.
  • Experience with facial motion capture cleanup and polishing.
  • Strong understanding of character animation fundamentals, including body mechanics, timing, weight, balance, momentum and natural human movement.
  • Experience with gameplay locomotion animation and transitions.
  • Experience working with Unreal Engine character animation or similar real-time game animation pipelines.
  • Familiarity with Maya HumanIK (HIK), MotionBuilder or comparable animation and retargeting workflows.
  • Strong understanding of animation retargeting and working across different character rigs and proportions.
  • Ability to identify and correct common motion capture and retargeting issues.
  • Ability to evaluate and refine animation quality within Unreal Engine, not only within Maya.
  • Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate within multidisciplinary teams.
  • Self-driven, organised and capable of independently managing workload.

Additional Valuable Skills:

  • Chinese language proficiency. As we work closely with international teams, Chinese language proficiency is very valuable.
  • Experience with Python scripting.