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Senior Blendshape Artist

Blendshape Artist – Generic Head Library

Orlando, FL

EA SPORTS is one of the leading sports entertainment brands in the world, with top-selling videogame franchises, award-winning interactive technology, fan programs, and cross-platform digital experiences. EA SPORTS creates connected experiences that ignite the emotion of sport through industry-leading sports video games, including Madden NFL football, FIFA soccer, NHL® hockey, and EA SPORTS UFC .

The EA SPORTS ART team is a global community of content creators covering Characters, Environments, Lighting, Project Management, Technical Art, and Visual Effects. Fueled by imagination and a unified passion to grow the love of sports for players worldwide, we push visual boundaries and create leading edge content. Serving our broad portfolio of sports titles, we craft amazing games for hundreds of millions of sports fans worldwide through inspiring visuals and immersive experiences. We are a diverse group that encourages team members to bring their unique perspectives and expertise to the table.

Role Overview:

The Strategic Character Initiatives Team in SPORTS Art works on special projects designed to drive forward character visuals, artist workflows, tools and technology, and character-centric game features. We partner with global R&D groups, central engineering teams, Frostbite, and specific titles within Sports to develop technology and art content that advance real-time characters. The visionary work we do adds both short and long term value to our entire product portfolio.

The Sr. Blendshape Character Artist will be responsible for:

• Bringing highly-realistic faces to life, capturing all the subtle nuance of facial deformations into a highly crafted system of blendshape poses.
• Discerning from video reference, identify idiosyncrasies about a particular person's performance that give them their character.
• Sculpting any scanned expressions that are not precisely on pose with a focus on key facial assets such as eyes, mouth, nose, and brow.
• Completing a facial rig of up to 300 blendshapes per character.
• Populating the blendshape rig with the base expressions and test to ensure likeness is maintained through range of motion
• Working closely with the rigging department to create clean, efficient, and highly polished facial rigs.

Your Qualifications

• 5+ years' experience in modeling and/or character art
• 3+ years' experience doing blendshapes for character art
• Exceptional portfolio in realistic character art. Please provide a link of your portfolio on your resume.
• Proficient technical skills in working with Maya, Photoshop, and ZBrush
• Deep knowledge of facial anatomy to include motion, proportion, silhouette and topology and how it relates to rendering and deformation.
• Advanced knowledge of FACS and associated micro-expressions and the ability to properly isolate muscle identification.
• Demonstrates an understanding of a broad mix of character related disciplines such as modeling, texturing, shading, rigging & binding, animation, facial animation and blend shapes.
• Experience in prototyping and working closely with multi-disciplinary teams consisting of technical artists, artists, and engineers.
• Demonstrates the ability to articulate the art direction focus and art reviews through written and verbal communication to internal and external teams.
• Demonstrates an excellent ability to interpret 2D reference material and scan data into 3D textured and surfaced models.
• Demonstrates an ability to document workflows that will be used by internal and external teams.
• Advanced technical experience is preferred.
• Master-level understanding of human facial anatomy.