Animation Programmer

Expansive Worlds is a creative division of Avalanche Studios Group and a leading developer and publisher of outdoor games. Since 2009, Expansive Worlds has been devoted to delivering highly immersive outdoor gaming experiences for millions of players and best known for the long-standing and successful theHunter franchise.

We are now looking for an Animation Programmer to work on theHunter: Call of the Wild

The Position

As an Animation Programmer you will develop and maintain both tools and runtime systems required to realize the vision for animation on the project. You should be able to understand the pros and cons with different approaches and be able to come up with new creative solutions to efficiently be able to achieve the desired quality.

The position also includes architecting the interfaces between the animation system and e.g. AI. Use and extend existing systems when possible, build new tools and features when needed. Assist animators in translating game design into technical animation design, help and educate game programmers working with animation related features and aid technical animators in implementing animations into the game. You will join our engineers in developing and maintaining our proprietary Apex Engine.

It is expected that you see your responsibility as delivering a successful end-user experience, together with your team-mates, rather than just handing off technological solutions to content creators. Much of the success of well executed game characters is down to how successfully they are integrated with all of the systems within the game engine, e.g. physics, animation, UI, SFX, VFX, dialog, etc. Previous experience and proven ability to work with multiple systems and stakeholders is a definite advantage. Finally, as with any other programming role, you will have to be able to balance functional requirements with technical requirements in the areas of performance, stability, memory usage, interoperability.

Required Qualifications

- Excellent communications skills
- Solid knowledge of game animation systems e.g. layering, masking, state machines, locomotion, facial animations, blending, and parameterization
- Experience working with IK, ragdolls and / or other procedural techniques
- Fluent in linear algebra
- Able to write readable, robust and performant code in C/C++
- Good knowledge writing scripts in Python
- A keen eye for animation


Desired Qualifications

- Experience in networking animated characters
- Experience with motion synthesis/generation
- Experience with machine learning for animation
- Experience working with game physics
- Experience of profiling and optimization
- Knowledge of Autodesk FBX Pipeline / USD (Universal Scene Description) Pipeline
- Knowledge of Maya