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Perry Leijten

Creature Rigging for Production: with Perry Leijten

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Perry Leijten

Senior Technical Artist, Square Enix Tokyo

Perry Leijten is a technical artist specialized in rigging, but does not shy away from creating tools and snippets to speed up this process. Perry started out as a university teacher in Holland giving lectures in the basics of Maya modeling, rigging and python scripting, until he got a job offer from Guerrilla Games to help finish 'Killzone:Shadow Fall'. He is currently working on 'Horizon: Zero Dawn' as a senior technical artist. In his spare time he helps out indie studios including Ragesquid (Action Henk), TwirlBound (Pine) and works on the rigs for Marauder Film's short 'Is This Heaven.'

Perry has proven himself as a very consistent and skilled rigger and skinner during the last 4 years that I had the pleasure working with him. He’s got a very good understanding of anatomy and what an animator needs to be able to easily animate with. He’s written a skinning tool that makes skinning a breeze, even for impatient people like myself. It is widely used within Sony Studios all over the world, which should tell you something about the quality of the tool. As a lead working with Perry has been great, he is able to work autonomously to a consistent high quality and is a very pleasant person to hang out with.
- Bart Wijsman
Lead Technical Animation - Guerrilla Games
Perry is the most skilled rigger I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. His drive to constantly improve his tools and methods are unparalleled resulting in a very efficient workflow and high quality rigs setting the benchmark for future projects.
- Jan Pijpers
Senior Technical Artist - Square Enix
Perry was one of my best students with great skill and a tremendous passion for rigging. It was a real pleasure to work with him while he was at an internship at Nazooka where he demonstrated he was capable of coming up with very elegant and creative rigging solutions.
- Kim Goossens
Graphical Technical Director - Ubisoft
Perry's rigging skill allowed him to rig--just for fun--one of the most accurate skeletal wrist assemblies I've ever seen. His willingness to tackle a complicated subject like that--and solve it--is impressive, but more than that, he is very good at explaining those kinds of subjects to other people--as I have personally witnessed when he has given advice to students at my university
- Andrew Paquette
Senior Lecturer - NHTV
Working on Is This Heaven with Perry continues to blow me away with whatever he gets his hands on; from highly-complex hard-surface assets that far exceed the Transformers I've made to organic hero characters that rival my the scale of my work on Pacific Rim. Perry continues to give our animators absolute flexibility, simplicity and cleanliness while infusing the asset with a great depth of character. On many occasions, as is in film, Perry has created bespoke shot-specific rigs to fit the needs of the movement and/or composition. In short; Perry is a rare one, and he's dutch, which means: He's highly trustworthy and made of hardy material!
- Bastiaan Koch
Writer/Director at Marauder Film