Character and Simulation Technical Supervisor

Description

The ADG Technical Character and Simulation Supervisor is responsible for envisioning, specifying, implementing and using both Character and Simulation pipelines and workflows that deliver film quality performances and effects while absolutely respecting the real time authoring environment of a modern game engine.

As Visionary/Planner/Deliverer:
• Develop and deliver leading edge techniques and workflows for a full digital human asset creation and performance capture pipeline. This includes but is not limited to:
o Evaluating and investigating new vendors, new software packages and new techniques.
o Running benchmark tests and establishing new technical budgets.
o Contributing to asset authoring, rigging and weighting methods and approaches for hero, mid-ground, background and crowd characters.
o Contributing to Mocap shooting and animation retargeting methods and approaches
o Contributing to techniques surrounding performance capture, data acquisition and fidelity preservation within the technical constraints of real time and near real time systems.
• Develop and deliver leading edge physical simulation techniques and workflows for physics systems ranging from character based secondary animation to large scale rigid body/destruction simulations. This includes but is not limited to:
o Evaluating and investigating new vendors, new software packages and new techniques.
o Running benchmark tests and establishing new technical budgets.
o Contributing to asset authoring, real-time, near-real time and offline simulation authoring techniques and workflows.

As Leader/Mentor:
• Create documentation and tutorials relating to technical issues to educate department subordinates as well as collaborators from other disciplines.
• Work with programming and tools teams to develop tools/scripts/plug-ins to streamline art processes.
• Work with other depts. to establish technical cross dependencies for projects.
• Comfortable and proficient in outsourcing pipelines. Must be able and willing to help work with outsourcers to train them in new working methodologies when necessary.
• Responsible for managing a growing a team and its interaction with other departments
• Assist in sourcing, interviewing, and hiring of new candidates as the team grows.
• Participate in pre-production planning to determine and address technical design requirements and issues.
• Participate in bidding and scheduling meetings for both development and production tasks as necessary.
• Responsible for generating, monitoring, and updating schedules, deliverables and due dates for teams targets.
• Assist in the planning of mocap and performance capture shoots as relates to asset requirements for shooting and the data set and quality expected as product of the shoot.

As Artist/Collaborator/Doer:
• Set up and run simulations for cloth, hair, flesh surfaces, and rigid body interactions.
• Solve technical production issues, especially those related to characters.
• Hero-creature enveloping using a combination of commercial software packages and proprietary tools.
• Script utilities/tools/plug-ins in various software packages.
• Create dynamic simulations in packages such as Maya or similar commercial DCC.
• Act as wrangler for a creature and/or a specific technique used across multiple creatures.
Education / Experience:
A minimum of 10 years of work experience with 5 years of leadership experience as a Maya rigger in digital animation, visual effects, games, commercials or producing cg characters and creatures for visual media.

Required Skills / Competencies:
Positive attitude and a team player.
Passion for the work.
Good communication skills.
Sufficient knowledge of Maya rigging techniques to optimize the performance of rigs.
Expertise with Maya is required.
Experience with Python scripting.
Feature Film/ games experience is required.
Experience in corrective sculpting.
Knowledge of anatomy and enveloping.
Demonstration of advanced rigging skills.
A demo reel demonstrating artistic and technical ability is required for this role.
Technical director background has superior rigging skills.
Real Time graphics experience required.
Experience in Mocap data wrangling and retargeting.

Preferred Skills / Competencies:
Bachelor's degree or equivalent degree in Computer Science, Computer Visualization, or Computer Animation is a plus.
Experience with Massive crowd software is a plus.
Block Party and proprietary rigging/ animation tools.