We partner with major AAA teams to ship real-time content. Senior, hands-on, fully remote.

The Role

Be the craft authority for character finishing. Take client-approved character proxies and drive them to final, game-ready assets at AAA shipping quality. You’ll work across 3 character pods, solve the hardest problems, set techniques and benchmarks, and mentor seniors while partnering with the Lead 3D Artist and client art leadership.

What You’ll Do

• Own character quality: Define the bar for anatomy, proportions, edge flow, deformation, materials, and presentation.
• Finish to final: Retopo/UV, HP→LP bakes, texture/material lookdev, shader setup, LODs, and in-engine validation (Unreal).
• Deformation-ready models: Build topology that survives extreme poses; guide skin weighting handoff and corrective solutions.
• Hair & cloth: Establish workflows for grooms (XGen/Groom plugins) and cloth (Marvelous Designer) with efficient in-engine results.
• Materials/PBR: Create calibrated skin/eyes/hair/fabric stacks; ensure consistent texel density and material budgets.
• Performance: Hit memory/tri/material/texture budgets; define LOD strategy and streaming requirements for characters.
• Reviews & mentorship: Run redlines/paintovers, unblock seniors/mids, and raise first-pass acceptance across pods.
• Tooling & pipeline: Shape Painter/Designer templates, baking presets, validation checklists, and batch processes with Tech Art.
• Client partner: Join reviews, translate feedback into concrete changes, and propose solutions that protect scope and quality.
• Presentation: Prepare turntables, breakdowns, and in-engine captures for approvals.

Requirements

• 8+ years in real-time character art; shipped at least one AA/AAA title with notable character ownership.
• Expert in Maya (or Blender/Max), ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter/Designer, Photoshop; clean retopo/UV/bake fundamentals.
• Strong Unreal Engine integration: materials/master instances, LODs, physics/collisions where needed, and in-editor validation.
• Proven excellence in anatomy, deformation-aware topology, and character lookdev (skin/eyes/hair/fabric).
• Track record of raising the bar through critique, mentorship, and hands-on problem solving in production.
• Clear, direct communicator in a remote, multi-time-zone team.

Nice to Have

• Facial topology and blendshape literacy; collaboration with rigging for face/body correctives.
• Hair grooming (XGen/Grooms), Marvelous Designer, scan/photogrammetry cleanup.
• Marmoset Toolbag, SpeedTree (for accessories), Houdini for utility ops.
• Scripting for workflow (Python/MEL/Blueprint utilities); ShotGrid/Jira familiarity.

Portfolio

• Show final, game-ready characters with succinct breakdowns: wireframes, map sets, tri counts, texel density notes, LODs, and in-engine captures (skin/eye/hair close-ups). If we can’t see process and results, we can’t assess.

What Success Looks Like

• First-pass approvals consistently high on client reviews.
• Characters meet visual targets and performance budgets without emergency rework.
• Seniors/mids produce predictably shippable results using your workflows.