Principal Animator

Meta Reality Lab's mission is to help people feel connected, anytime, anywhere. Expressive, interactive characters are a critical foundation to this mission. As Principal Animator on the team, you'll be working with a talented group of industry professionals leading the way in this emergent and creative space. If you're excited about forging into new territory and pushing the boundaries of real-time character animation across a variety of products, this may be the place for you. This work is just beginning, an animator jumping in at this point will shape the future of a new form of self-expression and styles of 3d character art and animation net yet defined

Principal Animator Responsibilities:

• Champion the art and craft of real-time character animation in the team
• Work with the Art Director, Animation Leadership and the immediate creative team to define and set quality standards
• Create believable and visually appealing character animations, poses and facial expressions that delight our audience
• Deliver production content to time and to specification, including key movement sets and the motion tree design to work with them.
• Build strong collaborative working relationships with all members of the animation and technical art teams, the wider team, the studio, and wider Meta organization.
• Using your end to end understanding of animation pipelines to proactively work with a multidisciplinary team (Engineers, Tech and Character Artists) to specify and research, then prototype and develop, flexible and performant animation systems for the future.
• Work with multiple vendors, collaborating and giving feedback on technical and artistic solutions

• Practical experience and understanding of setting animation quality, implementing real-time animation pipelines, and optimizing them
• Demonstrate a strong knowledge of what natural human movement and anatomy is, so that all animations are informed by this knowledge to give appealing visual results
• Highly proficient in relevant software packages, e.g. Maya and Commercial game engines
• Showreel that demonstrate excellent animation skills (the art) and the delivery of this content to run-time systems (the craft)
• Strong teamwork and communication skills, ability to receive and offer feedback, ability to provide creative direction

• Familiarity with design and optimization of animation motion trees (e.g. Unreal Animation Blueprints and State machines)
• Familiarity working with motion capture pipelines and equipment (e.g. Motionbuilder and Xsens)
• Familiarity with animation dynamics, e.g. set up of physics assets and ragdoll
• Experience in working with outsourcers / external contributors
• Experience with facial animation combined with facial customization
• Experience specifying and supporting animation tools development