Senior Animator, Facial
About the Company
Warner Bros. Discovery, a premier global media and entertainment company, offers audiences the world's most differentiated and complete portfolio of content, brands and franchises across television, film, streaming and gaming. The new company combines WarnerMedia's premium entertainment, sports and news assets with Discovery's leading non-fiction and international entertainment and sports businesses.
About WB Games Montréal
WB Games Montréal is a division of Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment (WBIE). Founded in 2010, we are 300+ creative team members strong who join forces every day to create unforgettable AAA experiences across all platforms.
Job Description
Join the Wonder Woman team and help bring an iconic DC Superhero to life!
Monolith Productions, the award-winning AAA studio who brought you F.E.A.R. and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, seeks a Senior Facial Animator with extensive experience developing keyframe and motion capture animations.
In this role you will be responsible for creating and implementing facial animations of the characters based on story, game design, and motion capture performances for the highest quality and functionality within the game. You will create realistic, industry-leading facial animations from both high-quality head cam footage, systemically generated audio-driven source data and hand-keyed.
This role is open only to people residing and having the legal right to work in Canada.
This position can be remote from home, on-site or hybrid from the WB Games Montreal studio.
Responsabilities
- Polish animation toward a final state by adjusting lip sync and facial animation to convey convincing speech, inner thought, and acting performance, and adjust body animation as necessary to enhance that performance.
- Working within the proprietary game engine to integrate polished animation, verify expected results and meet game-ready requirements.
- Use facial tracking/solving software to track/retarget to face rigs in Maya.
- Assist in the generation and refinement of a text-to-speech animation pipeline.
- Work closely with the lead and senior leadership and respond to feedback to bring work toward a final state.
- Update team on task progress through group meetings, spreadsheets, and other project tracking software.
Job Qualifications
Experience
- 5+ years of experience working as an animator in the entertainment industry with a focus on facial animation.
- Having worked on 2 AAA shipped titles. Experience of the complete production cycle from conception to shipping is a desired asset.
Skills & Knowledge
- Strong understanding of facial anatomy.
- Experience working in industry standard 3D software packages (e.g. Maya) and creating blend shape based facial systems and animations.
- Strong understanding of facial anatomy and FACS based-rigs to guide automated, motion-capture and wholly authored animation to a final state.
- Ability to generate quality facial performance initially, then respond to feedback to polish to a high quality, finished state.
- Ability to learn the process to export work into a proprietary game engine to evaluate it and track down issues.
Bonus Points: (desired but not required)
- Experience in motion and performance capture facial animation pipelines. (ex. Faceware)
- Experience using audio analysis software for facial animation generation. (ex. Speech Graphics)
- Experience using shared phoneme and emotional state pose libraries. (ex. Studio Library)
- Experience with varied rigging solutions to best support both automated and individually authored performances.
- Experience developing blend shape instances or attribute libraries to support targeted performances across a range of humanoid facial variants.
Please include a link and the password to review your portfolio or reel which demonstrates examples of quality lip sync, and the ability to convey emotion and inner dialogue, bringing life to a character.
