Description
Software Engineer-Facial Rigging
Responsibilities:
The Facial Rigging Engineer is in charge of maintaining, designing, and implementing tools, workflows and low-level pipeline frameworks for the Character Setup teams. Responsibilities would include supporting and developing some of our core character rigging tools, swapping and publishing tools, in-shot tweaking workflows, as well as cross-department code involving Layout and Simulation teams. The position requires strong software development skills, with a production-minded approach, and the ability to collaborate closely with both artists and engineers.
Required Skills:
Experience programming in Python and C++
Experience with Maya’s MEL and Python APIs
Experience writing GUIs using the Qt framework (C++, PyQt or PySide)
Knowledge of character rigging, animation, and studio pipeline development
Good communication skills and an aptitude for working in small teams
Knowledge with FACS (Facial Action Coding System)
Experience/knowledge of facial capture systems and techniques
Desired Skills:
Experience writing Maya plugins in C++
Bachelor in Computer Science or equivalent
Maya rigging, animation, and referencing toolsets
Experience with UNIX / Linux
About the Team: Front End Dev
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The Front End Team is responsible for designing, implementing and maintaining the pipeline and artist toolsets for a wide gamut of production departments, including Story, Modeling, Rigging, Texturing, Matte Painting, Layout, Animation, and Character FX, such as hair, cloth and skin simulation. Typical examples of tasks the team deals with are:
- dealing with huge environments made up of thousands of assets, and determining how best to interact with them in a software package like Maya, with multiple departments modifying the scene simultaneously.
- collaborating closely with lead animators to identify and build specifications for tools that would help artists work more efficiently, including pose libraries, character picking interfaces, or faster proxy rig representations.
- managing cross-application workflows, like loading assets in Mari in order to paint and publish textures, taking special care that UV layouts and naming conventions are properly respected.
- writing tools and Maya plugins for the creative manipulation of hair and cloth simulated elements, in order to reduce the time it would otherwise take to achieve a perfect dynamic solution to an artistic problem.
Direct collaboration with artists and an understanding of production workflows, while still maintaining a balance between pragmatism and proper software engineering methodologies, are key to being successful on this team. It's also critical to be comfortable working within an established codebase, and to understand when to leverage existing solutions instead of reinventing the wheel.