Senior Technical Animator

2K; Farnham; On-site; GBP 40,000 - 60,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading game studio is seeking a Senior Technical Animator to design rigs and animations for their quirky characters. This role involves cross-disciplinary collaboration, development of custom tools, and sharing knowledge with team members to enhance their creative processes. Ideal candidates will have over 5 years in the gaming industry with strong skills in Maya, Unity, and scripting.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in a Technical Animator Role.
• Experience using Maya and Unity.
• Strong scripting skills in C# and Python.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain rigs for characters, props, and machines.
• Collaborate with animators on animation workflows.
• Develop pipelines for character assets.

Skills

Technical animation

Scripting in C#

Scripting in Python

Animation principles

Problem-solving

Team collaboration

Tools

Maya

Unity

Blender

Job description

About Two Point:

Two Point Studios sizzled into existence in the summer heat of 2016 with a goal to create amazing, deep simulation games that not only remain accessible to everyone, but also don't take themselves too seriously - we call them our little people games! In 2018, our hard work came to fruition and Two Point Hospital was born into the world to much acclaim. After Hospital we had a dream of creating an entire world of these little people games within the place we call “Two Point County”, and in 2022 our latest game Two Point Campus was released. With us being a part of the Sega family, and with the success of Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, we’re now pushing forward with our next games to continue to make our “Two Point County” dream a reality!

Life at Two Point Studios is exactly as we believe it should be: fun, flexible and super creative! Everyone in our lovely team gets stuck in. You’ve got some awesome ideas? You can bet we want to hear them! We’re a second family here, we all look out for each other, and we love what we do, but we understand that your real family needs you too, so we aim to strike the perfect work life balance enabling you to have fun at the office and get home to your loved ones with time to spare.

The Senior Technical Animator role:

Two Point Studios is seeking a Senior Technical Animator to join our team and help bring our wonderfully wonky world to life. You’ll work closely with our animation, art, and engineering teams to rig quirky characters, build efficient pipelines, and animate everything from eccentric contraptions to delightfully oddball humans. If you’re equal parts technical wizard and animation enthusiast, and you love turning chaos into charm, we’d love to hear from you.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Design, build, and maintain rigs for characters, props, and machines across the Two Point world.
  Create high-quality animations for the game

• Collaborate with animators to establish best practices and develop efficient animation workflows.

• Develop and maintain pipelines for characters, props and machine assets.

• Design and implement custom tools to improve and streamline animation and rigging processes.

• Work with production and leads to identify workflow bottlenecks and proactively propose pipeline improvements.

• Research, prototype and develop new techniques for character pipelines, bringing your own and your co-workers’ ideas to life.

• Partner with engineering, art and design teams to solve cross-disciplinary challenges and support feature development..

• Mentor and support other team members, sharing knowledge and fostering a collaborative learning culture.

REQUIREMENTS

• 5+ years of experience in a Technical Animator Role within the games industry.

• Experience of using Maya and Unity with strong scripting skills in C# and Python.

• Solid understanding of animation principles and real-time locomotion systems.

• Deep knowledge of tech animation topics including state machines, blend trees, and runtime animation systems.

• Proven ability to collaborate across disciplines, working closely with character artists, animators, tech artists and engineers to bring features to life.

• Take ownership of shippable quality content/systems that are memory-efficient and performant.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a talent for developing clear, scalable solutions to complex issues.

• A creative, solution-orientated mindset, with the ability to think outside the box to overcome technical challenges.
• Self-motivated and able to work independently when required, with strong time-management and organisational skills.

PLUSES

• Familiar with Blender and its animation/rigging workflows.

• Experience setting up and maintaining real-time animation pipeline in Unity, particularly in close collaboration with gameplay engineers.

• Ability to read and understand C# code to enhance communication and collaboration with engineers