Edmonton, Alberta

Nathan Zufelt

Animation Director

I've directed animation on BioWare's story-driven RPGs for nineteen years, and I build the tools that let a small team work at AAA scale.

I started in television animation, spent nine years as a cinematic animator and lead, then directed animation on Anthem and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Most recently I was Director of Animation across gameplay, living world, ambients and technical animation on Mass Effect: Universe.

I also build the production side: procedural pipelines in Maya and Unreal Engine 5 that take on the repetitive work, verify every result, and leave every performance with the animator.

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What I lead
  • Gameplay animation
  • Cinematics
  • Ambients and living world
  • Technical animation
  • Animation pipelines and tools
Games
  • Mass Effect: Universe cancelled 2026
  • Dragon Age: The Veilguard 2024
  • Anthem 2019
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition 2014
  • Mass Effect 3 2012
  • Dragon Age II 2011
  • Mass Effect 2 2010
  • Dragon Age: Origins 2009

Recent work

Highlights from my time as Senior Animation Director at BioWare, 2020–2026.

Gameplay systems

  • Powered ragdoll, physics play and chained abilities
  • Hit reactions and deaths with complex locomotion blending and matching
  • NPC and player traversal
  • CQC takedowns and paired combo animation systems
  • Navmesh-aware motion warping
  • Weapon variants and weapon-overlay locomotion

Cinematics and living world

  • Procedural cinematic pipeline: hundreds of conversations from script to staged scene, with rule-based cameras and MetaHuman facial animation from VO
  • Seamless scene-to-gameplay hand-offs
  • Ambient smart-object animation sets with seamless enter/exit and transition setups
  • NPC reaction systems with layers of escalation, and automated testing of authored reactions to player input, gameplay and dialogue

Mocap and tools

  • Markerless capture: automated Epic's MetaHuman markerless tracker and tied it into production retargets and style transfer, so animators go from video to retargeted data on rigs, with each retarget in seconds
  • 15-stage mocap clean-up run as a headless Maya farm: thousands of clips at an average of ~5 s each
  • Style transfer: one posture and weapon hold applied across whole locomotion families
  • Physics test harness that turns ragdoll bugs into repeatable checks

Career

  • 2020 – 2026BioWare · Senior Animation DirectorAnimation Director on Mass Effect: Universe and Dragon Age: The Veilguard
  • 2019 – 2020Improbable · Animation SpecialistAnimation and content pipelines, gameplay prototyping, and automated DCC-to-runtime creature pipelines
  • 2007 – 2019BioWare · Cinematic Animator to Animation DirectorAnthem, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening
  • 2006 – 2007Bardel Entertainment · Character AnimatorViva Piñata, Chaotic and the Zeke's Pad pilot
  • 2004 – 2008CG Toolkit · Marketing and web development
  • 2004 – 2005New Machine Studios · AnimatorBrave, a TV series pitch

Education: iAnimate feature animation masterclasses (2011–13) · Vancouver Film School, 3D Animation and Visual Effects (2005–06) · Applied Multimedia College, Classical and Maya Animation (2003–04)