Technical Animator - Crusader Kings 3

Are you a technical and dedicated Animator with experience in developing pipelines? Are you interested in helping Paradox Development Studio to take Crusader Kings 3 art to the next level? Then you may be the one we’re looking for!
About the role
In the role of Technical Animator, you’ll work with the animation, tech art, and engineering teams to devise solutions and workflows, creating rigs for animators and high-fidelity deformation for assets. Your ability to analyze and plan will help the studio develop tools to support character artists and animators in production. You’ll also be responsible for our motion pipeline from creating custom rigs, optimizing workflows with scripts to keyframe animation.
As a Technical Animator, your responsibilities will be to support the needs of the animators by ensuring they have the tools they need to do their jobs. As well as being the driving force pushing the animation fidelity, you will be in charge of the animation pipelines on our games to help us achieve stunning results, while keeping efficiency at its peak.
Responsibilities
Align with Art Director on the current state of the tools and future needs
Work with our engine team and animators to develop and improve the pipeline
Working with our in-house scripting language to improve the tools and pipelines
Creating highly functional rigs for our animators to use.
Support animation with implementation and validation of animation assets
Together with Tech art develop and maintain maya tools using python
Test and debug tools and processes to ensure pipeline stability
Proactively look for potential future improvements together with animation
Working together with our character art team to support high-fidelity deforming assets

Requirements
Ability to be the bridge between both the Technical and Creative disciplines.
Knowledgeable in 3D animation packages such as Maya, with a technical focus on rigging, skinning and tools scripting.
Knowledge and experience of rigging methods and deformation in Maya
Ability to code with Python or PyMel. Creating tools and scripts to increase productivity of the art team or other asset creators.
Motivated, creative and able to utilize own initiative to implement solutions and improvements to internal processes.
Basic understanding of Character deformation techniques and dynamics. Be it cloth, bones, blend shapes or displacement maps.
A strong portfolio demonstrating your animation rigs and rigging tool development for games.



The right candidate is passionate about strategy games and about maintaining historical accuracy, which is very central to many of our IPs. At Paradox we take pride in providing opportunities for our artists to work on varying projects and titles, and to develop and learn new skills. Therefore we also actively look for people who are interested in expanding their talents. If you enjoy working in a fast-paced open work-environment, you’re going to like it here.