Animator

Persona AI Inc•Houston, TX

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Persona AI is developing and commercializing rugged, multi-purpose humanoid robots that perform real work. Persona’s founding team has a decades-long history in humanoid robotics, bionics, and product development delivering robust hardware that has touched the stars, worked miles below the surface of the ocean, roamed Disney Parks, and has even been featured on a US postage stamp. We are looking for Character Animators who show a strong understanding of appeal, weight, locomotion as well as entertainment, specifically for human or humanoid motion. In short, we need someone who can turn capable robots into helpful creatures that humans will want to work with and around.

Requirements

Background in character animation for games or film, and excitement about seeing your animations come to life in the real world.
Proficient in Blender, Maya or 3ds Max.
Proficient in rigging and animation with joint and inverse kinematics constraints.
Able to animate appealing and believable motions while remaining physically plausible.
Familiar with motion capture and retargeting.
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience animating for robots.
Experience working in Nvidia Omniverse.
Familiar with physics based animation and physics modeling.

Responsibilities

Shape the way our robots move in the real world: animate reference gaits, idle motions and interactions for our robotic personas.
Rigging and animation of Persona robots.
Motion capture, cleanup and retargeting of motion data to Persona robots.
Advise the motion controls team with the goal of increasing the appeal of the robot and avoiding the uncanny valley.
Work with the motion control team to ensure feasibility of the animations and realize them on the physical robot.
Work with the software team to develop tools and plugins for animation of physical characters.