About
Job Description
Rockstar is currently seeking an Animation Programmer with an interest in facial performance capture, animation and rigging.
We are looking for a talented engineer to help us develop advanced facial performance capture, animation and rigging technology for our character based games. You should have strong initiative, a detailed knowledge of facial animation and rigging techniques, as well as a passion for realistic, high quality facial performance capture.
RESPONSIBILITIES
* Develop, maintain, extend and support a wide range of facial animation and rigging performance capture systems, editing pipelines, tools and runtime systems.
* Join our core animation technology team and work closely with performance capture, animation, rigging, technical art and tools teams across different Rockstar studios.
* Keep up to date with the latest academic and industry breakthroughs, independently research and develop improvements to continuously push our technology forward.
REQUIREMENTS
* A degree in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent industry experience.
* Strong C/C++ programming skills, OO design skills and 3D math background.
* Working knowledge of character animation technology (e.g. skeletal hierarchies, blend shapes, animation compression techniques etc).
* Experience developing within a large existing codebase, collaborating or working independently within a large team.
* Familiarity with optimization and multi-threading techniques.
* Passion for character based games, good eye for facial performance capture.
* Good communication skills, ability to clearly share complex technical information with programmers, technical artists, animators, and riggers.
DESIRED
* Industry experience working on AAA character based games, or character based VFX animation.
* Strong Python programming skills.
* Practical success in applying machine learning / deep learning (ML/DL) to production scale problems.
* Familiarity with computer vision techniques, or photogrammetry.
* Proficiency in animating or rigging (using skeletal bones or blend shapes) in 3DS Max, Maya, or Blender etc.
* Knowledge of existing facial capture approaches, FACS poses, facial blend shape rigs etc.
* Experience writing GPU shaders, or with GPGPU programming (CUDA, OpenCL etc).