Technical Artist, Pipeline/Animation

Do you have experience in game development and a particular interest in art pipeline tools? Insomniac Games is looking for a Technical Artist to join its Core Technology department and focus on the development of its AAA game engine and tools suite with one of our technical art teams. A background in technical animation can be useful for this role. Candidates may be considered at higher seniority levels.

This job is primarily individual contribution, with support, peer mentoring, and planning responsibilities as appropriate. You'll be developing ownership over an area of Insomniac's art pipeline tools, creating forward-looking and cutting-edge features to support the needs of the production teams building games such as Marvel's Spider-Man and Ratchet & Clank. Others in this role have recently been involved in projects like advanced retargeting and IK/FK, a shared repository of motion capture data to reuse across games, Houdini-based tools for procedural destruction, and more.

The Core Technology department at Insomniac includes programmers and technical artists who are scheduled separately from game teams, offering an amount of independence and self-management to individuals on the team. They maintain close communication with the game production teams, ensuring that the engine team has a direct relationship with the people using their tools and tech to make our games.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following:

• Design and develop improved content-creation pipelines, processes, and workflows
• Provide documentation and mentor the game teams to fully take advantage of our tools and technology
• Create sample content to prove out new workflows and demonstrate visual improvements
• Provide support to content creators for tools and pipelines owned by the department
• Respond to bug reports, feature requests, and questions related to our tools
• Maintain current knowledge of technological developments in the game industry
• Other duties may be assigned

Qualifications:

• Strong verbal and written communication
• Strong knowledge of Maya as it pertains to engine content creation:
  
  
  
  • Animation, modeling, fx, and rigging features
  • Extensibility via Python, PyMEL, PyQt/PySide, and the Maya API
  
  
  
  
• Knowledge of the content-creation landscape and modern content-creation tools, like Houdini
• Knowledge of the game engine landscape and modern engine feature sets
• Experience with technical animation, programming, or a related field
• Experience with C++ is a bonus

If you're unsure whether you meet the qualifications for this role, please err on the side of applying!