Principal Rigging Tech Artist · Rascal Games
- Owned rigging architecture and the character pipeline for an unannounced title.
- Designed AI-integrated tooling to speed up production across Maya and Unreal Engine.
Résumé
Nathan Comes
Principal-level rigging technical artist and AI tools developer with 16+ years shipping AAA games across console, PC and mobile, including Destiny 2 at Bungie and Xbox Avatars at Microsoft. I build the systems that sit between artists and the engine: modular auto-rigging frameworks, automated facial pipelines, motion capture workflows, Maya C++ plug-ins and cross-DCC tools. The go-to person for stylized and non-human characters whose constraints break off-the-shelf tools.
Senior Rigging Tech Artist · Worlds Untold
- Built rigging systems and production pipeline tools for a new AAA studio in Maya and Unreal Engine.
Lead Rigging Technical Artist · Counterplay Games
- Led the rigging team within a 120-person studio: sprint planning, cross-team communication and quality standards.
- Architected FRAG, a modular rigging framework with 40+ auto-discovered component types, full serialization and single-call rebuild from templates.
- Automated the facial pipeline, converting blendshape faces into joint-driven deformation.
- Built cross-platform tools for Maya, MotionBuilder, Unreal, Blender and standalone Python.
Senior Rigging Technical Artist · Bungie
- Destiny 2 and 8+ releases, including Curse of Osiris, Warmind, Forsaken, Shadowkeep, Beyond Light and The Witch Queen.
- Rewrote and automated the facial rigging content pipeline: joint-based NPC faces of about 120 joints and fewer than 200 poses, using linear skinning decomposition.
- Rigged characters and creatures for cinematics across multiple expansions.
- Maintained and revamped studio-wide tools; built the ShotGrid–Maya integration.
- Worked in Unity on a separate Bungie project.
Lead Technical Animator / TA · Microsoft
- Xbox Avatars (2nd generation). Built animation and modeling pipelines, an auto-rigger, an animation/pose library and Avatar Factory in Maya.
- Managed outsourcing studios and weekly team planning. Worked in Unity alongside Maya.
Technical Animator · Freelance
- Rigging, skinning, animation tools and animation.
Lead Technical Animator / Animator · Signal Studios
- Shipped Savage Lands, Toy Soldiers: War Chest, Ascend: Hand of Kul, Sleeping Prince and Toy Soldiers Complete.
- Wrote the DCC codebase, including a custom rigging system; rigged every biped, quadruped, turret and vehicle character.
- Built animation and modeling tools, including an FBX batch exporter for Unity and Unreal with Perforce and TFS integration; led team scheduling.
Visual Data Specialist · Google
- Managed a team of 25. Rigged and animated characters for internal presentations and prototypes.
Skills, strongest first
The rare combination
Maya C++ plug-in development (custom deformers and DG nodes, MPxNode/MPxDeformerNode, attribute design, dirty propagation, parallel-evaluation safety, Cached Playback, thread determinism). Numerical correctness as a working habit: RBFs, Green coordinates, skinning decomposition, RK4, least squares. Test suites for graphics code, with DCC-free maths cores.
Rigging & character technology
Stylized and non-human rigs; metadata-node rig architecture; IK/FK, splines, twist, space switching, ribbons, rivets; facial rigging (regions, poses, correctives, in-betweens, mirror maps); pose and animation libraries; retargeting; skinning and weight transfer across topologies.
Pipeline & tools engineering
Python across Maya, MotionBuilder and Unreal on a Python 3.7–3.11 / PySide2–6 version matrix from one codebase; Qt tool UIs with no logic outside the API; per-interpreter dependency management; multi-version CMake builds; asset registries, variants and gear systems; undo-safe scene operations.
AI systems
Multi-agent orchestration with persistent memory and typed task contracts; tiered model routing; local inference on self-hosted GPUs; MCP servers for Maya and Unreal; codebases written to be navigated by agents.