Gameplay Engineer - Character Animation

Responsibilities

• Create animations in Maya for Unity.

• Create advanced character animations graphs in Unity using state machines and blend trees.

• Troubleshoot and resolve Unity animation problems.

• Create both realistic and expressive character animations.

• Collaborate with teammates to achieve the desired aesthetic of the game. Follow references, concepts, and art direction, while also having the initiative to take the work further independently.

• Validate your work on device (Oculus VR Headset in the Unity editor).

• Optimization. Implement features that fit within performance budgets (CPU/Memory/Streaming, etc.)

Qualifications

• 4-5 years experience creating advanced animations for game characters.

• Strong portfolio showing abilities in creating high quality animations and systems for 3D character movement and interactions.

• Strong knowledge of Maya and Unity.

• Implementation experience in one or more of the following areas: inverse kinematics techniques, keyframe animation and forward kinematics, ragdoll and physics-based character animation, procedural animation techniques, data-driven motion synthesis (eg -  motion matching, style transfer, motion warping, motion editing, multi-character animation, crowd modeling, etc), and other machine learning driven animation techniques.

• Understanding of state machines, blend trees, low-level playback as related to animation. Familiarity with animation techniques like pose-space deformations and blend shapes.

• Experience animating UI and props.

• Strong knowledge of performance trade-offs and optimization for mobile VR (GPU and CPU impacts).

• Proficient with C# scripting language.

• Ability to repurpose, modify, and improve existing animation.

• Strong organization and problem solving skills.

• Excellent communication and teamwork skills.

• Fluent in English.

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience animating for virtual reality.

• Experience with source control (Plastic, GIT, Perforce).

• Experience with mocap recording and cleanup.

• Knowledge of Unity FX.

• Knowledge of vertex animations and shaders.

• Knowledge of Python.

• Proficiency in at least one Machine Learning library (Tensorflow, Torch, etc).