Technical Animator - Nottingham, United Kingdom - Sumo Digital Ltd.

Sumo Digital Ltd.

Verified Company

Nottingham, United Kingdom

3 weeks ago

Posted by:

Tom O´Connor

beBee Recruiter

Description

Job reference

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Company Name
Sumo Digital Ltd.
Salary
Competitive
Location
Nottingham, United Kingdom
Country
United Kingdom
Industry sector
Animation
Job start date
ASAP
Posted date
05/06/202 Experience Level
Junior-Associate
Job type
Permanent | Full Time
Remote / Hybrid
No

About Sumo Nottingham
Sumo Nottingham develops action and racing games for console and PC, bringing character and innovation to everything we do.

Sumo Nottingham develops multiple AAA projects with some of the world's biggest publishers, with games such as Team Sonic Racing and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

As well as contributing to genre-defining titles like the Forza Motorsport, Horizons and Hogwarts Legacy; Sumo Nottingham's vast development experience spans multiple genres and platforms.

The team at Sumo Nottingham is growing, and we are looking for talented people to help bring a series of incredible projects to life.

As winners of the TIGA Star Employment Award for 2021, recipients of the GI Biz 2020 Best Places to Work Award and listed as one of the UK's 100 Best Large Companies to Work for in 2021, Sumo Digital has enjoyed 18 years of stability and growth since its formation in 2003 and continues to strive for excellence across every single project.

We are in the early stages of prototyping an innovative multiplayer action title based on a new IP, and are looking for talented developers to join the team.

This is a unique opportunity to help shape an ambitious new game from the very earliest stages, work with the latest technologies (e.g. Unreal Engine 5) and to play a crucial role delivering on the game vision

In the role of Technical Animator, you'll work with the animation and engineering teams to devise solutions and workflows, creating rigs for animators and high-fidelity deformation for assets.

Your analytical ability and planning skills will help the studio develop tools for the future to support character and animation production.

You'll also be responsible for our motion pipeline from creating custom rigs, optimising workflows with scripts to keyframe animation.

As a Technical Animator, you will be supporting the needs of the animators by ensuring they have the tools they need to do their jobs.

As well as pushing the animation fidelity, you will be controlling the animation pipelines on our games to help us achieve stunning results, whilst keeping efficiency at its peak.

The Technical Animator works with both in-house animators and external partners, as well as our engineers.

We're open to this person being based in-studio, hybrid or fully remote (in the UK).

Skills and experience:

To act as a bridge between both the Technical and Creative disciplines.
Expert knowledge of 3D animation packages such as Maya, with a technical focus on rigging, skinning and tools scripting.
Strong knowledge and experience of rigging methods and deformation in Maya and Unreal, related to video game rigs.
Ability to code with Python or PyMel. Creating tools and scripts to increase productivity of the art team or other asset creators.
Experience helping to maintain animations in Unreal Engine 4 or Unreal Engine 5 (or other game engines).
Good understanding of Unreal's runtime animation systems such as statemachines and animation blueprints.
Motivated, creative and able to utilise own initiative to implement solutions and improvements to internal processes.
Solid understanding of Character deformation techniques and dynamics. Be it cloth, bones, blend shapes or displacement maps.
A strong portfolio demonstrating your animation rigs and rigging tool development for games.
Solid understanding of facial animation methodologies.
Foreseeing potential issues and communicating effectively to department leads.
Critiquing assets on an ongoing basis to drive continual improvement and ensure quality across the game within defined budgets.

It'd also be great if you have:

Knowledge of the Maya API and lower level programming languages such as C++
Production experience developing a AAA quality game.
Some experience or understand of Facial Capture technology and Facial Analysis software.

What we offer: