Rigging Director (New AAA Project)

Responsibilities

• Establish rigging specifications, skeleton naming conventions, and cross-departmental delivery pipelines for all characters, creatures, and vehicles across the project.
• Design and implement cinematic-level facial motion capture driven rigging solutions (ARKit / MetaHuman / in-house solutions are all acceptable).
• Build a complete FACS-standard BlendShape system to meet the requirements of high-fidelity facial performances.
• Lead the physical rigging of cloth, hair, and soft bodies, and their integration with UE5 Chaos/NvCloth.
• Develop rigging toolchains and automation scripts using Python/MEL/C++.
• Design and maintain Control Rigs, IK/FK solvers, and next-generation rigging template libraries.
• Evaluate and introduce cutting-edge technologies such as ML Deformer and Neural Rig.
• Lead the rigging QA process.
• Establish standards for deformation quality, stretch limits, and intersection detection to ensure all assets meet platform certification (TRC/TCR) requirements.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of character rigging experience in the gaming or film/television industry.
• Proven experience participating in AAA console/PC game projects.
• Proficient in Maya/Houdini, with strong expertise in UE5 Control Rig development and Blueprint rigging workflows.
• Proven track record of successfully delivering complete facial motion capture rigging projects (ARKit, MetaHuman, or in-house solutions).
• Familiar with physical cloth/hair simulation systems (Chaos Cloth, XGen, Ornatrix, etc.).
• Solid scripting skills in Python/MEL; C++ experience is a plus.
• Deep understanding of realistic/semi-realistic human anatomy and character deformation principles.