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Technical Artist - Animation

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 videogames, including Madden NFL football, FIFA soccer, EA Sports College Football, EA Sports PGA Tour, NHL® hockey, and EA SPORTS UFC.

The EA Create Team encompasses all of the positions needed to make game cinematics, such as motion capture, rigging, animation, tools and tech, environments, characters, and lighting teams.

Create Animation is one of EA's central teams, responsible for bringing characters and performances to life across all of EA's franchises. Led by industry veterans from film and game industries, we work on award-winning franchises in partnership with teams like BioWare (Mass Effect, Dragon Age), Respawn (Jedi: Fallen Order, Apex Legends, Medal of Honor), EA Sports (FIFA, Madden, College Football) and other high profile game teams!
Our team collaborates with many teams across Create and EA, such as Motion Capture, Rigging, Scanning, and more. We work on a diverse catalog of games across many different animation styles, from realistic to stylized, from humans to creatures.

We are looking for a Technical Artist who has a passion for problem-solving. In this role, you will report to a Development Director, and you will need to be collaborative by nature, able to partner with animation directors, leads, and stakeholders to ensure effective collaboration to produce quality assets, tools, pipelines, and workflows. And enjoy making games! While this role is technical in nature, we are also looking for candidates who possess an eye for aesthetics to maintain a high-quality artistic vision.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement and support animation tools and technologies used on specific titles.
• Support central animation workflows that span across multiple titles in collaboration with content creators and engineers.
• Integrate cinematics and gameplay animation content into the game engine.
• Interact and support the rigging team on character rigs and animation transfer.
• Provide creative and technical problem solving with a view to delivering efficient quality animation content.
• Define, estimate and prioritize tasks in a well-organized manner.
• Document workflows, technical processes, and tools.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of tool creation experience for art/animation workflows on multiple titles/projects.
• Intermediate knowledge in Python.
• Proficient in standard industry tools Maya.
• Familiarity with animation content integration in engine.
• Knowledge and understanding of body and facial production rigs for debugging and tool writing purposes

Plus

• Familiarity in C#, MEL, Maya API
• Experience in Motionbuilder/ MotionBuilder API
• Experience with editor-based game development environments e.g. Unreal, Unity, etc.
• Experience in Qt
• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining animation content workflows as part of an end-to-end animation pipeline.