Senior/Lead Technical Artist (Rigging)

Lightspeed LA is looking for a Senior/Lead Technical Artist (rigging) who has a passion for building AAA quality characters to life. This is a flexible, highly creative role responsible for building an immersive game experience in a living, breathing world.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build character rigging pipeline.
• Collaborate with character, animation and mocap team to integrate rigging pipeline.
• Develop custom rigging tools,nodes and deformers.
• Set a golden standard for production rigs.
• Work with production to establish a project schedule.
• Build, mentor and manage a rigging team.

Minimum requirements:

• 5+ years experience in rigging.
• Shipped at least one AAA game with high quality/complex rigs or equivalent VFX/Feature animation production.
• 2+ years as a senior, lead or principal artist on shipped AAA title.
• Expert knowledge of Maya
• Demonstrate and understanding of anatomy and facial motion.
• Ability to review character designs and models.
• Familiar with FACS and other face systems.
• Familiar with mocap integration.
• Familiar with game engine and/or GPU based rendering.
• Python pipeline and tool development.

Additional desired knowledge:

• C++ plugin development.
• Experience with dynamics based cloth, muscle and/or hair solutions (Houdini, NCloth, etc.)