Character Animator

Gamexcite is an independent game studio. Our last release was Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown, and we are now working on a new Star Trek game. We're a small team: short decision paths, direct collaboration, and real ownership of your area.

The role

You'll stage and animate in-game dialogue scenes with MetaHumans in Unreal Engine 5. Lip sync and facial animation come from automated tools such as NVIDIA Audio2Face or JALI. Your job is to turn that into a believable performance: body language, gestures, idles, and custom animation where a scene needs it.

You'll also bring the ship to life - crew working at stations, using consoles and moving through rooms.

What You'll Do

• Stage and animate dialogue scenes; build reusable talk, gesture and idle sets, and create bespoke animation for key moments
• Investigate, Integrate and polish output from facial animation and lip-sync systems, and help improve them
• Set up crew paths and room animations with our internal tools
• Identify props that need interaction animations and prepare them for animation work
• Create new animations and improve existing ones
• Implement animations in UE5 and fix transitions, repetitive idles and timing issues
• Work closely with tech art and programming on the animation pipeline

Requirements

What you need

• Character animation experience on shipped games, and a reel that shows it
• Body mechanics, posing and timing; experience with dialogue or cinematic animation
• Solid UE5 animation knowledge, including Sequencer and implementing into existing runtime systems
• Experience with MetaHumans and their body and face Control Rigs, working non-destructively (no changes to skeleton hierarchies)
• Maya as your main animation tool - we need Maya source files, and clean round-trips between Maya and Unreal
• Retargeting experience
• Git, and Unreal asset management including redirectors
• Judgment on when reused assets or automated output are good enough and when a scene needs custom work