Technical Animator

8K Solutions, located on the Space Coast of Florida, leverages our combined experience in sports video technology, and long-term relationships with elite coaches and athletes, to make us the optimal partner for a vast array of coaching video requirements. 8K Solutions provides a unique variety of new and established technologies for these partners, ranging from practice acquisition solutions to player and team development visualization tools.

We are currently expanding our Software Engineering department to include full-time support with the animation characteristics of our 3D Playbook. The ideal candidate has a proven track record of building and maintaining high-performance animation pipelines in Unity.

Requirements for this position:

· A proven, deep knowledge of football, including its rules and positions.

· Experience with motion capturing (mocap) (especially cleaning).

· Experience with Maya or Blender, specializing in rigging, skinning and animating.

· Proficiency with Unity's Animation System and Playable Graphs

· Good understanding of C# scripting and plug-ins within Unity3D Engine to help improve the animation pipeline.

· Experience with Unity Animator Controller state machines and blendtrees.

· Experience importing and exporting animations from DCCs such as Blender or Maya

· Excellent communication skills to provide technical feedback about the tasks, rigs, toolsets and documentation.

· Strong demonstrated work ethic and self-motivation.

· Passion for working at the intersection of sports and technology.

· Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field, plus 3+ years directly related technical Animation experience.

Responsibilities of this position: `

· Direct talent during mocap sessions to capture authentic performances.

· Work with a team of developers and animators to skin, rig and animate player characters (football, hockey, basketball, etc.) and props (stadiums, scoreboards, benches, etc.)

· Utilize expertise in state machines and motion matching to create seamless and dynamic in-game animations that deliver high quality assets with high realism.

· Provide clean assets following established standards in systems and requirements.

· Work in an Agile Software development environment with the ability to take task ownership.

· Work with animators and developers to execute projects on time.

· Participate in code reviews, provide constructive feedback to the engineering team.

· Problem-solve all things animation and gameplay systems, helping the team no matter where in the pipeline.

· Accurately estimate effort required and deliver quality results.

· Stay current with the latest animation technologies and trends, incorporating new tech like AI, ML, VR/AR, etc. into projects.

Additional Experience Preferred:

· Basic knowledge on version control systems, preferably Git.

· Good understanding of anatomy and character movement.

· Familiarity with Unity3D Engine art production pipelines.

· Experience in debugging and testing software.

· Experience with animation techniques such as motion matching, procedural animations and inverse kinematic (IK)

· Knowledge of facial rigs to add emotions to characters.

· 3D Modelling experience

· Good knowledge of Shader Graph / VFX Graph

· Familiarity with Character Creator, SkinGen, Marvelous Designer, Zbrush or similar modern character pipelines to create AAA quality game characters.

· Experience optimizing animation performance for mobile platforms

Job Type: Contract

Pay: $50.00 - $75.00 per hour

Expected hours: 35 – 40 per week

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Titusville, FL 32780