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Technical Art Lead, Rigging - League of Legends

Established in early 2016, the Hong Kong Studio is Riot’s first international game development studio. We’re a diverse team, representing more than 15 nationalities and partnering with teams in the LA headquarters on League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, and Legends of Runeterra. On top of this, we’re currently building teams for VALORANT, a character-based tactical shooter, and Project L, our take on the fighting game genre.

While operating like a startup—with autonomy and total ownership—we’re doubling down on our goals to build a world-class studio in a vibrant, international city, on a continent that is home to the League of Legends World Champion teams. The Hong Kong Studio is looking for talented, passionate people across all aspects of game development to help build Riot’s blueprint for a global, multi-studio world... and to make great games!

We focus on working together to promote individual autonomy, ownership, collaboration, and inclusivity so every Rioter can be their best while we boldly pursue games. This means less emphasis on titles and hierarchy and more emphasis on creating the right environment to ship excellent experiences to players.

That’s where you come in.

As the lead of the Rigging team, your team will create, improve, and maintain rigs for characters and other assets in the game. In addition to character rig generation your team will own developing tools and support for all other art disciplines. Working closely with animation, modeling and concept teams, you will uncover new ways to improve workflow and ensure functionality, consistency, and quality. Your teams mission is to always be accelerating animators, maintaining excellent quality, and ensuring that the animation team’s output meets all technical and other standards required by our portfolio of projects

Responsibilities:

• You will own our studio’s animation tools and processes, and facilitate and improve them in order to accelerate animation production and meet project technical requirements and other standards
• You will lead a world class team of talent in China, and develop and grow their skills through training and feedback
• Mentor and support your team in executing team goals and help them grow and develop as Technical Animators
• Create and oversee the creation of advanced rigs for a variety of characters and assets using Maya and other internal tools.
• Provide technical support to artists working from our art workflows, collecting data to further improve the tools they are using
• Refresh the performance of our rigs and animations by running them through your teams creative quality control process
• Spread knowledge of the team’s processes and help teams expand their technical know-how.

Required qualifications:

• Expert technical animation skill and expertise with content creation tools, specifically Maya
• Experience mentoring and training other technical animators. Growth minded and motivated towards teaching, enabling, and coaching other technical animators
• Strong understanding of figure and facial anatomy
• Strong experience translating art/animation requirements into sustainable workflow design
• You are a strong communicator and able to communicate abstract/sophisticated ideas in a concise way, in English or in Chinese
• Basic English - you can discuss work and craft with other English speakers
• 5+ years experience as a character rigger in games or related industries. Bonus points if you worked on content heavy pipelines

Desired Qualifications:

• You have a broad experience, working in animation production end to end
• You have in depth knowledge of League of Legends
• Mandarin speaker

Applicable technologies:

• Maya
• Python
• LUA

Our Perks:

• Full relocation support
• Full health insurance for you, your spouse and children
• Open paid time off
• Retirement benefits with company matching
• Life insurance, parental leave, plus short-term and long-term disability
• Play Fund so you can broaden and deepen your knowledge of our players and community through games
• We will double down on your donations of time and money to non-profits

As a part of the application process, candidates will be expected to provide a portfolio or demo reel of their work and may be asked to complete an art test.