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.