Studio: Meta Reality Lab
Job Opening: Principal Animator
Location: Leamington Spa/London UK
Type: Full-Time
Responsibilities:
- Champion the art and craft of real-time character animation in the team
- Work with the Art Director, Animation Leadership and the immediate creative team to define and set quality standards
- Create believable and visually appealing character animations, poses and facial expressions that delight our audience
- Deliver production content to time and to specification, including key movement sets and the motion tree design to work with them.
- Build strong collaborative working relationships with all members of the animation and technical art teams, the wider team, the studio, and wider Meta organization.
- Using your end-to-end understanding of animation pipelines to proactively work with a multidisciplinary team (Engineers, Tech and Character Artists) to specify and research, then prototype and develop, flexible and performant animation systems for the future.
- Work with multiple vendors, collaborating and giving feedback on technical and artistic solutions
Qualifications & Skills:
- Practical experience and understanding of setting animation quality, implementing real-time animation pipelines, and optimizing them
- Demonstrate a strong knowledge of what natural human movement and anatomy is, so that all animations are informed by this knowledge to give appealing visual results
- Highly proficient in relevant software packages, e.g. Maya and Commercial game engines
- Showreels that demonstrate excellent animation skills (the art) and the delivery of this content to run-time systems (the craft)
- Strong teamwork and communication skills, ability to receive and offer feedback, ability to provide creative direction
- Familiarity with the design and optimization of animation motion trees (e.g. Unreal Animation Blueprints and State machines)
- Familiarity working with motion capture pipelines and equipment (e.g. Motionbuilder and Xsens)
- Familiarity with animation dynamics, e.g. set up of physics assets and ragdoll
- Experience in working with outsourcers / external contributors
- Experience with facial animation combined with facial customization
- Experience specifying and supporting animation tools development
