We're looking for a senior Maya rigger to help us bring a giant pterosaur to life

Reference: https://youtu.be/YvQRH1BvKSk?t=61

The job

Take our existing Quetzalcoatlus flight rig and make it genuinely good - better deformation, more believable flight and ground motion - without breaking the control scheme or invalidating the animation already built on it, and make sure it all survives the trip into Unreal Engine 5.

Context

Quetzalcoatlus is one of our hero animals: a giant pterosaur that glides in, lands, hunts, and launches back into the sky. Final content is rendered realtime in Unreal Engine 5, so the rig has to be both beautiful and engine-friendly.

This is an upgrade pass on an established rig, not a build from scratch. We're after someone who can elevate it surgically rather than rebuild and re-version everything - a careful, considered hand more than a clean-slate approach.

The benchmark

We've got a test blockout animation the upgraded rig needs to perform convincingly:

Glide > land > spear a fish with the beak > quadrupedal vault back into flight.

The make-or-break moments are the wing membrane folding and re-extension through the landing/launch transition, and the quadrupedal launch vault itself. If those read well, the rig is working.

What you'll likely be solving

• Wing membrane deformation across full extension, gliding, folding for the terrestrial pose, and the launch.
• Pteroid / propatagium leading edge behaving correctly through those states.
• A clean flight-to-ground transition that doesn't collapse or interpenetrate.
• Corrective / pose-driven blendshapes where skinning alone won't hold up - wing root and shoulder, wrist, the long neck, and the jaw on the fish strike.
• Correctives authored so they translate to UE5 as morph targets driven by joint angle, not Maya-only deformer trickery that dies on export.

Pipeline (expect some back-and-forth here)

Maya (Zoo Tools Pro / Hive) > FBX > Unreal Engine 5. We'll iterate in loops together: you export, we test deformation, morph-target driving, and realtime performance in engine, then we refine. Plan for a few rounds to get the in-engine result matching the Maya result. Sensible joint and morph budgets matter because content runs realtime, and root-motion handling through the takeoff/landing needs to behave.

Must haves

• Preserve existing controls and naming so our current animation still plays back.
• Versionable - deliver as an additive upgrade with the original intact and roll-back-able.
• Scientific credibility - muscle deformation and motion should hold up to a curatorial eye.

You should have

• Senior-level creature rigging in Maya.
• Fluency with Zoo Tools Pro (Hive).
• Strong corrective / pose-driven blendshape craft.
• A demonstrable Maya-to-Unreal skeletal-mesh + morph-target pipeline, ideally with the engine-side driving (Pose Driver / RBF, Control Rig, or AnimBP) on your reel.
• A reel showing creature deformation under extreme poses.

Nice to have

• Membrane-wing experience - pterosaur, bird, or bat.
• Realtime / virtual production.
• Comfort QA-ing your own deformation directly in UE5.

Get in touch

We'd love to hear from you. Drop us a line with:

• A reel (lead with creature deformation work).
• Your availability and your rate against a time estimate.