Senior 3D Animator

Anklebreaker Studio; Paris; On-site; EUR 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

AnkleBreaker Studio near Paris is seeking a Senior 3D Animator to bring Mithrall: Realm of the Dwarves to life with weighty, readable animation across PvP and exploration. You will model and animate dwarves, creatures, and related in-game actions, collaborating with designers and programmers to achieve responsive, polished results.

Join a small, senior team that values craft and learning the latest techniques.

Qualifications

• Senior experience animating for games with at least one shipped title.
• Strong body mechanics and a clear sense of weight and timing.
• Experience with combat and locomotion animation and transitions.

Responsibilities

• Animate dwarves locomotion, combat, tool use, building and crafting actions.
• Animate creatures across biomes, up to dragons.
• Collaborate with gameplay programmers to tune timings, blending and root motion.
• Set up animation in Unity/Unreal and maintain animation pipelines.
• Maintain consistency in weight and personality across the cast.

Skills

Senior game animation

Weight & timing sense

Gameplay animation

Stylized character animation

Animation pipeline understanding

Tools

Maya

MotionBuilder

Blender

Unity

Unreal

Job description

About Mithrall

Mithrall: Realm of the Dwarves is a fantasy survival sandbox MMO built in Unity URP. Players are dwarves: they terraform the land, build their kingdoms, craft in the world rather than in menus, trade in a player-driven economy and fight over territory in hardcore PvP with full-loot death, across a seamless, contested open world. The game has already been through a public playtest, and you can wishlist it on Steam.

About the studio

AnkleBreaker Studio is an independent studio near Paris: ten people, all senior. At our size there is no validation layer, only people who make things. We work hard, we build in person, and we share the upside: every shipped title returns a slice to everyone who built it. We use AI. We use AI, and we would rather say it upfront. Tools and techniques move fast, and our workflows change regularly with them. If you join us, you need to be ready to work with the latest techniques. We will train you on them. You also need to stay at the cutting edge, technically and in performance, and to be at ease when the way we work changes. We are looking for ambitious people who want to build the biggest games of tomorrow.

The role

In Mithrall, almost everything happens in the world: players fight, dig, build and craft with their hands, not in menus. We are looking for a Senior 3D Animator who makes all of that feel good, look right at every distance and stay readable in the middle of a PvP fight.

What you will do

• Animate playable dwarves: locomotion, combat, tool use, building and crafting actions, interactions.
• Animate creatures across the biomes, up to dragons.
• Work with gameplay programmers on responsiveness: timings, cancel windows, blending, root motion, and how an action reads for the player on the other side of a fight.
• Set up and maintain animation in Unity: Animator controllers, blend trees, layers, retargeting, and help shape the animation pipeline.
• Keep the whole cast consistent in weight and personality.

What we are looking for

• Senior experience animating for games, with at least one shipped title.
• Excellent body mechanics and a strong sense of weight and timing.
• Gameplay animation experience: combat, locomotion systems, transitions.
• Fluency in Maya, MotionBuilder or Blender, and hands-on experience integrating animation in a game engine (Unity or Unreal).
• A reel that shows gameplay animation in context, not only cinematics.

Nice to have

• Experience with Unity's Animator and Animation Rigging.
• Motion capture cleanup and editing.
• Rigging skills.
• Multiplayer experience, where an animation has to read clearly for the player receiving the hit.

How we work

Full-time, permanent contract (CDI), on-site at our studio near Paris (Le Pecq / Le Vésinet, on the RER A line). A small, senior team that works hard and builds together. You will work directly with design, code and the rest of the art team. We talk compensation openly on the first call.