Skills
So what do I do? Here’s a breakdown of my day-to-day with respect to the technical animator trifecta of rigging, implementation, and pipeline development.
Rigging
- Rigging creatures, props, environmental assets and humanoids in Maya.
- Maintaining a database of assets, patching and updating where needed.
- Custom retargeting solutions to transfer animations between characters, or between DCC packages.
- Implementing animation feedback on rigs, refining or adding features.
Implementation
- Implementation of locomotion, AI, combat, and non-organic animations.
- Working with blendspaces, aimposes, additives and corrective poses.
- Setting up runtime IK.
- New runtime feature research and development with engineering teams.
- Debugging animation issues, feeding back to animation or code as needed.
- Authoring animatable assets for use in engine. Creatures, props, humanoids etc.
Development
- Python and C++ tool development.
- Automation in Maya for animation, rigging, and batching tasks.
- Custom Maya plugins for import/export pipelines.
- Tools to bulk edit engine implementation data.
- Tools integrating into project management software.
- Maintenance and deployment of pipelines.
- Updating legacy code from python 2 to python 3.
Soft(er) Skills
- Supporting animation, troubleshooting workflow issues.
- Disseminating specialist information through documentation to a larger studio.
- Establishing development best practices, providing supporting documentation.
- Evaluating technology stacks to deploy to solve various development challenges.
- Training new staff in proprietary technologies.
- Agile workload planning and bug triage.
- Gathering and executing on feedback.
If you are interested in hearing more detail about any of the points listed above, please contact me via my linkedin page.