A Technical Director (TD) provides critical support to a show's artists and department heads. A Technical Director will design, develop, and implement new tools and processes for a particular show or department. As needed, a Technical Director may be asked to do shot work.
Essential duties and responsibilities:
- Provides technical support for aiding artists with the completion of computer graphics shots.
- Assists artists with troubleshooting and debugging of production issues.
- Support and develop tools and procedures, which maintain and enhance the production pipeline.
- Create documentation.
- Ensure software development follows studio policies and guidelines.
- Assist in training and mentoring of other TDs as required and appropriate.
- Assist in envisioning studio goals. Can work on goals with supervision.
- Works with multiple departments and across multiple areas of Technical Direction.
- Develops and implements new computer graphic techniques.
- Provide support and development of tools and procedures to extend and enhance the pipeline.
- Assist animators and artists with troubleshooting of shots. Issues may include problems with fur, clothing, particle effects, animation, and rendering.
- Support and work with multiple departments, including Modeling, Animation, Lighting, FX, and Research and Development.
- Work closely with other Technical Directors, Production Supervisors, VFX Supervisors, and Production Engineering to maintain and further the production pipeline.
- Assist in training and mentoring of other Entry Level and Associate Technical Directors.
Expectations:
- Ability to take direction and work in a team environment.
- Ability to pay close attention to detail; oftentimes on repetitive tasks.
- “Customer first” mentality and willingness to provide direct support to individuals.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
- Experience with the Unix environment.
- Strong math and programming skills.
- Must have a positive attitude.
- Ability to support (non-technical) artists teaching or tutoring experience, project roles that interface between developers and clients.
- Excellent problem-solving skills involvement in small teams tackling big multi-discipline projects.
- Sound computer science knowledge object oriented programming (OOP), design patterns, projects implementing large systems, C++, Python.
- experience with computer graphics 3rd party packages like Maya, Max, Lightwave, coursework or other studies in computer graphics, 3D game development.