Company: Roarty Digital

  Roarty Digital Inc. is seeking an exceptionally skilled and pipeline-focused Technical Artist / Character Rigger to serve as a vital cornerstone for our characters and animation pipeline. This critical Character Rigger role demands a professional who is deeply proficient in navigating both Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine, ensuring that beautiful static character sculpts are transformed into highly articulate, dynamic, and engine-optimized assets ready for production. The ideal candidate behaves as a natural bridge between character modeling, traditional animation, and real-time engine engineering. You will take immediate ownership of body and facial rigging, anatomical skinning weight distribution, complex animation retargeting pipelines, and real-time interactive physics setups. If you are a self-motivated technical creator who thrives in a collaborative team environment and loves perfecting the deformation and movement of digital characters, we want to hear from you. Job Overview Character Rigger The foundational administrative, geographic, financial, and structural parameters of this position are organized below for clear reference. Parameter Specifications & Details Company Name To be disclosed under initial NDA screening Position Title Technical Artist / Character Rigger Department Technical Art / Character & Animation Pipeline Job Type / Tenure Full-Time Engagement Work Model Fully Remote Primary Location Remote within North America or South America (Strongly Preferred) Estimated Base Salary Range $65,000 – $90,000 USD per year (Gross/Pre-tax) Hourly Rate Equivalent Approximately $32 – $45 USD per hour (Depending on contract structure) Experience Level Mid-Level (2+ Years of verified studio experience) Language Requirement Proficient written and spoken English skills (Mandatory) Technical Stack Focus Autodesk Maya, Unreal Engine (AnimGraphs, Retargeting, Chaos Cloth)     Core Responsibilities: What You’ll Do As our Technical Artist/ Character Rigger, your day-to-day work balances complex anatomical puppet construction with cutting-edge real-time engine integrations. Your core tasks are divided across three operational pillars: 1. Advanced Character Rigging & Skinning (Maya) Deformation & Mechanical Setup: Architect, implement, and maintain robust, scalable character rigs inside Autodesk Maya, ensuring skeletons are highly optimized for game engine traversal requirements. Anatomical Skinning: Apply precise skin weights across complex bipedal and creature models, maintaining excellent structural integrity and natural muscle/joint volume preservation during extreme poses. Facial Setup & Blendshapes: Build expressive, high-fidelity facial rigging systems utilizing complex combinations of joint-based deformation and localized facial blendshapes to translate nuanced performances accurately. 2. Unreal Engine Integration & Retargeting Pipeline Asset Ingestion: Act as the direct owner for importing character meshes, skeletons, and animation assets into Unreal Engine, ensuring data integrity, correct scale, and clean asset hierarchies. Animation Retargeting: Manage our animation library retargeting pipelines, seamlessly adapting existing animations across varying skeletal proportions, tracking down structural offsets, and troubleshooting joint rotational anomalies. Real-Time Animation Workflows: Collaborate closely with animation departments to establish fluid runtime systems, working confidently within Unreal’s AnimGraphs, state machines, and control rigs. 3. Dynamics, Physics, & Secondary Motion Sets Real-Time Cloth Solutions: Set up, paint weight maps, and optimize real-time physics-driven cloth solutions within Unreal Engine to deliver believable secondary motion for clothing, capes, and accessories. Dynamic Interactive Physics: Implement rigid-body, ragdoll, and capsule-driven physics setups for hair, dangling objects, pouches, and armor components, ensuring they react naturally to environmental forces and player acceleration.   Candidate Profile: Who You Are   Required Technical Qualifications Studio Tenure: You possess 2+ years of professional experience operating as a Technical Artist or Character Rigging Artist inside the interactive video game or high-end Visual Effects (VFX) industries. Software Mastery (Maya): Deep, practical experience using Autodesk Maya for advanced deformation setups, constraint systems, and scripting configurations. Engine Proficiency (Unreal Engine): Proven expertise integrating visual components, building character Blueprints, creating physics assets, and handling systemic optimization inside Unreal Engine. Comprehensive Portfolio: A strong, diverse rigging reel or portfolio demonstrating production-ready body rigs, flawless joint placement, and believable facial expressions (blendshapes/joints). Animation Workflow Literacy: A complete understanding of the parameters governing real-time animation constraints, frame-rate budgets, draw calls, and vertex-processing optimizations. Soft Skills & Team Alignment Strong Communicator: Outstanding English communication skills, allowing you to clearly convey technical problems, write clean documentation, and align priorities with creative directors. Autonomy & Initiative: Highly self-motivated and comfortable managing your tasks and balancing delivery timelines inside a decentralized, remote working framework. Collaborative Teammate: You are an empathetic professional who values collective feedback, welcomes diverse design points of view, and enjoys brainstorming alongside animators and character artists.     Pre-Application Assessment Questionnaire To help us accelerate our onboarding screening and perfectly align your distinct skills with our upcoming project milestones, please provide clear, direct, and detailed answers to the questions listed below. There are no right or wrong answers — Roarty Digital Inc. highly value transparency, technical candor, and practical descriptions of your experience. Portfolio Overview: Please provide the direct link to your online portfolio or rigging showreel. Briefly point out which assets highlight your strongest facial blendshape work and your best real-time cloth simulation work inside an engine. Unreal Engine Pipeline Depth: On a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable are you taking a raw character file from Maya, importing it into Unreal Engine, mapping out its physics assets, and setting up its runtime cloth layers completely independently? Please provide a brief example of a challenging engine setup you resolved. Animation Retargeting Experience: Can you describe your past practical experience with Unreal Engine’s IK Retargeter system? What specific steps do you take to fix stretching or joint rotation errors when passing animation data between different skeletal frameworks? Maya Rigging Workflows: Do you utilize custom scripting (Python/MEL) or third-party automated rigging systems (e.g., Advanced Skeleton, mGear) to optimize your production workflow in Maya, or do you build custom rigs entirely from scratch? Geographic & Work Status: Are you currently located full-time within North America or South America? What is your current work availability (e.g., immediate, 2 weeks’ notice, 4 weeks’ notice), and what are your baseline salary expectations for a full-time position?   How to Apply If you meet the requirements and are eager to tackle our complex character pipeline challenges, please submit your updated Curriculum Vitae (CV) and completed Assessment Questionnaire responses … Read more