Keywords Studios is looking for a Technical Artist - Animation to bridge art and engineering, bringing characters, creatures, and animated worlds to life. This role contributes to animation-driven R&D and ensures high-quality, performant character systems across projects.
What You'll Do
- Work closely with animators, character artists, and gameplay engineers to ensure efficient workflows and high-fidelity animated content.
- Translate the technical requirements of the animation team into actionable solutions for engineering and pipeline teams.
- Diagnose and resolve complex animation-related issues including rig behavior, deformation quality, skeletal hierarchies, retargeting, and physics performance.
- Design, build, and maintain modular, animator-friendly rigs for characters, creatures, props, facial animation, and mechanical assets.
- Implement and refine physics-based systems including ragdoll setups, cloth simulation, spline dynamics, secondary motion, and procedural animation solutions.
- Develop scalable animation blueprints, state machines, blend trees, and control rigs in Unreal or Unity.
- Integrate motion capture data, build retargeting pipelines, and ensure consistent motion quality across diverse character sets.
- Create and maintain tools, scripts, and automated pipelines that improve animation productivity and asset quality.
- Build validation tools to enforce naming conventions, skeleton standards, rig integrity, and performance budgets.
- Profile and optimise animation systems, rig performance, runtime solvers, and physics setups to work efficiently within hardware constraints.
- Participate in cross-discipline R&D to establish best practices for real-time deformation, procedural animation, and advanced simulation workflows.
What We're Looking For
- Experience with Python, C#, MEL, PyMEL, MAXScript, Blueprints (Unreal), Editor Tools (Unity).
- Understanding of runtime animation systems, rig solvers, and physics components.
- Character & Creature Rigging.
- Cloth / Hair / Ragdoll / Physics Setup.
- Animation Pipeline Development.
- Procedural Animation & Secondary Motion.
- Performance Profiling & Optimisation.
- Motion Capture Integration.
- Tool & Workflow Development.
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with shader scripting (HLSL/GLSL) for deformation or skinning R&D.
- Experience with Houdini for procedural rigs, physics, motion tools.
Technical Stack
- Unreal Engine (Control Rig, Physics, Animation Blueprints).
- Unity (Mecanim, Animation Rigging Package, DOTS animation optional).
- Maya, 3DS Max, Houdini.
- Perforce, Git.
- Photoshop, Substance.
Team & Environment
You will work alongside Matt Bell, Studio Art Director.
Work Mode
This is a hybrid role with opportunities available in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Keywords Studios is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers applicants for all positions without regard to race, ethnicity, religion or belief, sex, age, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws.
