Character Artist

Character artists are, as you might expect, responsible for creating the people and creatures of a game’s world, along with many of their personal props and weapons.  Expert knowledge of human and animal anatomy is one of the most important skills by far, along with the usual solid grasp of artistic fundamentals such as silhouette, color and form.  Skill in recreating the looks of cloth, fur, skin and other materials, in both 3D and texture, is also essential, and familiarity with historical costuming, weaponry and armor is very useful, particularly if you hope to be contributing to the design of the characters (how much input character artists have on initial character design varies from studio to studio – they will often state in job descriptions if it is expected).  Most modern studios use a sculpt-first pipeline for characters, so being comfortable with 3D sculpting, retopology (and creating good topology for animation and deformations later on), modeling and texturing are all essential.  At some studios, character artists may also be in charge of rigging or even animating their characters.  While this tends to be highly dependent on the team size and culture and is easy to avoid if it’s not what you’re interested in, familiarity with rigging and animation are exceptionally useful in being able to communicate intelligently with teammates further down your pipeline.