3D Character Artist

Schedule: LATAM / Eastern Europe / Asia Time Zones

Salary: $400 - $600 USD/month

Location: Remote (Work from anywhere!)

Contract: Full-Time Contractor

Read this if you want to build the face of a real indie game

We’re a funded indie game studio working on our flagship online multiplayer game — a noir spy game we’re rebuilding from 2D into 3D. We just shipped our first playtest, players love it, and we’re heading toward festivals and a real Steam launch.

We are scrappy. We are funded. We have full runway for this project. We have a marketing budget. We have programmers, a tech lead, and environment artists. What we need now is the right person to build the most important asset in the game — the main character. The agent every single player sees, controls, and remembers.

Your character on a Steam page. At festivals. In dev logs. That is the upside we’re selling.

As our 3D Character Artist, you will:

This is an ownership role. We hand you reference and an art direction bible. You take our main character from concept to a finished, game-ready, rigged asset that drops straight into our project — and you own that result.

A high-quality real-time character that reads as believable in-game, not low-poly, inside a strict 20,000 – 25,000 triangle budget
Clean, deformation-ready topology — proper edge flow through the face, shoulders, elbows, wrists, fingers, hips, and knees
Full left-right symmetry, organized scenes, preserved editable source, and incremental backups
Skinning / rigging to our existing Humanoid-standard rig — matching the exact bone hierarchy and bone names so our existing animations just work
In-engine validation: the rig is tested against our real aim, cover, movement, and idle animations and all deformation issues are fixed before any texturing begins
Textures that support our agency recolor pipeline — one base asset that recolors cleanly across multiple agency colors
Future characters and NPCs once the hero is locked

Who we are looking for?

A real-time character artist who treats topology and edge flow as a craft, not an afterthought
Someone who can hit a strict triangle budget and still make it look high quality — silhouette first, detail baked where it counts
Someone who can skin a character to a pre-existing skeleton and match a fixed bone-naming convention exactly
Someone comfortable validating their work inside the game engine, not just in a DCC viewport
Someone who treats an art direction bible as a brief to nail, not a suggestion to reinterpret
Someone scrappy and hungry who wants their work on a real, shipped game

Rigging and skinning ability is a strong plus. Animation ability is a bonus. At minimum, your models must be rig-ready — clean, symmetrical, deformation-ready topology built to a Humanoid standard.

Who we’re NOT looking for

Cinematic / offline-only artists who can’t hit real-time game budgets
Stylized-only artists who can’t match a specific art direction
Artists who can’t or won’t skin to an existing rig with a fixed naming convention
Artists who treat texturing as step one instead of the last step after deformation is proven
Purists who refuse to work within a modern, partly AI-assisted pipeline — or, the opposite, anyone who ships raw unedited AI output with no cleanup

The honest pitch

We are a brand new studio. We have momentum. We have a real game with real players who’ve already given us real feedback. We have funding and runway. We are aiming for festival showings and a real Steam launch.

This is not a job at a big studio with a comfortable salary. This is a $400 – $600 USD/month contractor role at a scrappy indie studio that is going somewhere. You will build the face of the game. Your work will be the first thing anyone sees. Your name will be attached.

If you want that, apply. If you want corporate comfort, don’t.

Why Join Us?

Logistics

Compensation: $400 – $600 USD/month, full-time contractor through our staffing agency
Time zone: LATAM, Eastern Europe, Asia, or anywhere with working-hours overlap with UTC-6 to UTC-3
Start: ASAP
Engagement: long-term contractor. We invest in our people.

How to apply

Apply through this listing with your portfolio — we want to see real-time game characters, your topology / wireframes, and any rigging or in-engine work you’ve done. We screen for craft, pipeline discipline, and culture fit — in that order. We move fast and we respect your time.