About this role

That covers gameplay enemies, the ambient motion that makes an arena feel like a place, a boss the room stops to look at, and the intro and outro cutscenes you build with the environment artist. All of it plays on a ten-foot projection in the dark, watched half-attentively — so silhouette and movement carry the read, and fine surface detail largely disappears.

Rigging is the emphasis. The same character may need an authored cinematic performance in an intro and a clean procedural reaction mid-round, where the input arrives as a live coordinate rather than a cue you can animate around. This role owns the character pipeline end to end.

Every team either builds a new game for Obsidian or takes one already running in the bay and makes it better.

What you’ll do

Build the characters

Model and texture game-ready characters, creatures and bosses.
Design shapes and proportions that stay legible at bay distance and in peripheral vision.

Rig them properly

Build production-grade skeletons, skin weights, control rigs and blendshapes.
Rig for hit reactions arriving from any direction, blended against locomotion and state changes.
Build rigs the next person can work with, including the next cohort.

Animate the performance

Animate locomotion, attacks, dodges, deaths, idles, and the hit reactions that carry gameplay feedback.
Build animation sets that survive a state machine, not just a demo-reel loop.
Handle motion capture where a scene calls for it — sessions, cleanup and retargeting.

Make the cutscenes

Build the character performance that carries the intro and outro — acting, timing, weight, and the beats that make a boss reveal land.
Work with the 3D Environment & VFX Artist, who owns camera, staging and assembly while you own the performance inside the shot.

Get it into the engine

Integrate characters, rigs and animation into Unreal or Unity as working assets.
Optimize rigs and animation for real-time rendering.

What we’re looking for

Required

DigiPen graduate — any graduating class
Portfolio demonstrating character modeling, rigging, and animation
Demonstrated rigging ability: skeletons, skin weighting, control rigs, and blendshapes
Proficiency in a 3D character pipeline. Ours is Blender, ZBrush, and Substance Painter, with modeling, sculpting, rigging, and animation all running through Blender — Maya-trained artists are welcome, but you must be ready to pick up Blender and work in it from day one
Experience getting rigged, animated characters into Unreal or Unity as working in-engine assets — not just renders
Understanding of real-time rendering and animation optimization

Ideal degree track

ideal, not mandatory — a strong character artist from any track is welcome

BFA in Digital Art and Animation, ideally with a Character Art or Animation focus

A master’s degree in a related field counts the same as the tracks above — an MS or MFA is equally welcome.

Preferred

Already fluent in Blender, particularly its rigging and animation tools
Boss or large-scale creature work, where scale and presence carry the moment
Cinematic character animation for cutscenes
Facial rigging and blendshape work
Experience with animation state machines — Animation Blueprints, Unity Animator, or similar
Motion capture cleanup and retargeting
Comfortable in both Unreal and Unity — the engine is chosen per team, so flexibility is worth real money here
Interest in themed entertainment or immersive experience design

What you’ll learn

Designing characters for readability at projection distance and in peripheral vision, which is a harder constraint than it sounds
Rigging for procedural, unscripted reactions rather than authored ones
Making a boss moment land in a physical room with an audience in it
Building cinematic sequences as a two-person craft, where the performance and the camera have to be designed against each other rather than in turn
Taking motion capture from raw session data through cleanup and retargeting to something that holds up in-engine
Owning a character pipeline end to end — model through in-engine — inside nine weeks
Working with programmers who wire behavior onto your rigs, and building rigs that make their job possible rather than painful
Working a real production pipeline alongside designers, environment art, and audio

Compensation

Total hours: 180 hours
Hourly rate: $23.50 / hour
Total earnings: $4,230.00
Expected pace: About 20 hours/week, roughly 9 weeks
Payment: Bi-weekly, direct deposit
Structure: 1099 contractor

The 180 hours are the commitment; the calendar is not. Twenty hours a week for about nine weeks is what we expect in practice, but the weeks don’t have to run consecutively and the pace can flex. We set a schedule with you at the start and work around holidays, travel, and your other commitments.

This is a part-time, paid position and does not include benefits.

How to apply

Apply for this role.

Email [email protected] with Character Modeling & Animation Artist in the subject line. Send all four of these — an application missing one of them is hard to act on, and we would rather not have to come back and ask.

01Your resumeAttached to the email — PDF preferred.
02Your GPARequired. Include it in the email body.
03A link to your portfolioA video reel and a portfolio site are preferred. Make sure everything opens without a login.
04Your general availabilityThe days and hours you can be on-site and reachable, so we can plan collaboration and playtesting around the people on your team.

Apply — Character Modeling & Animation Artist

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