Top 12 Character Artist Skills to Put on Your Resume

In the competitive world of character design, showcasing a diverse set of skills on your resume can sharply elevate your chances of landing the job you want. Below you’ll find the top 12 character artist skills—core tools and workflows that show craft, taste, and technical fluency—so your resume doesn’t just blend in, it sparks interest.

Character Artist Skills

1. ZBrush
2. Maya
3. Substance Painter
4. Photoshop
5. Blender
6. Unreal Engine
7. Unity
8. Marvelous Designer
9. 3ds Max
10. Mudbox
11. Houdini
12. Arnold Renderer

1. ZBrush

ZBrush is a digital sculpting powerhouse for crafting highly detailed character models, from broad forms to pore-level surface work, with fast iteration and deep brush control.

Why It's Important

It’s the industry’s go-to for high-resolution sculpting and texturing, letting character artists shape anatomy, stylization, and microdetail with surgical precision—vital for believable forms and personality.

How to Improve ZBrush Skills

To sharpen your ZBrush chops, try this:

1. Master the basics: Sculpting fundamentals, DynaMesh, ZRemesher, subdivision workflows, and clean anatomy blockouts.

2. Study anatomy relentlessly: Human and animal. Gesture first, forms second, detail last. Use photo scans, maquettes, anatomy books.

3. Explore brush behavior: Trim, HPolish, Clay Buildup, Move, Inflate, DamStandard—know exactly when and why to use each.

4. Always use references: Real-world photo boards, turnarounds, material studies. Pinterest, ArtStation, traditional sculpture—keep a library.

5. Engage with communities: ZBrushCentral and Polycount for critique, process breakdowns, and workflows that save hours.

6. Bring in real-world textures: Scan-based alphas and tiling maps add believable breakup fast.

7. Practice Polypaint: Direct-on-mesh painting for quick lookdev and style exploration.

8. Push into advanced tools: FiberMesh for hair, MicroMesh/NanoMesh for repeating detail, Surface Noise for subtle richness.

9. Iterate: Short daily sculpts, speed studies, focused exercises on hands, faces, folds, hair.

Follow these and keep sculpting—consistency does the heavy lifting.

How to Display ZBrush Skills on Your Resume

2. Maya

Maya is a production-proven suite for modeling, rigging, animation, and rendering—still a backbone of many film and game pipelines.

Why It's Important

It ties character creation to animation and rigging smoothly, with robust tools for topology, UVs, deformation, and scene management that scale to studio needs.

How to Improve Maya Skills

1. Solidify fundamentals: Outliner hygiene, component selection, pivots, constraints, and hotkey-driven speed.

2. Topology first: Edge flow for deformation, clean loops around joints, quads where it counts, and controlled density.

3. UVs and shading: Consistent texel density, logical shells, and PBR-ready material setups.

4. Rigging and skinning: Joint placement, corrective shapes, weight painting discipline, and deformation testing with test anims.

5. Animation awareness: You don’t need to be an animator—just understand arcs, overlap, and how rigs really move.

6. Pipeline mindset: Export settings, naming conventions, versioning, and scene optimization.

7. Practice: Build a small character end to end—model, UV, rig, pose, light. Then do it again faster.

How to Display Maya Skills on Your Resume

3. Substance Painter

Substance 3D Painter is the standard for painting PBR textures directly on your mesh with real-time feedback, smart masks, and powerful material layering.

Why It's Important

Characters live and breathe through materials—skin, leather, fabric, metal. Painter makes believable wear, breakup, and nuance attainable and repeatable.

How to Improve Substance Painter Skills

1. Lock in the basics: Channels, bake maps, UDIMs, resolution strategy, and non-destructive layers.

2. Custom brushes and alphas: Build your own library to stamp unique style and speed up fine detail.

3. Smart Materials and Masks: Start with them, then edit. Push beyond presets for your signature look.

4. Reference-driven texturing: Collect surface references. Think history: how was this worn, weathered, stored?

5. Stylized vs. realistic: Study both. Learn edge accents, hue variation, and roughness storytelling.

6. Export discipline: Know target engine/shader needs. Name maps clearly, pack channels when helpful.

7. Iterate: Texture quick busts, then full characters. Speed passes reveal gaps fast.

How to Display Substance Painter Skills on Your Resume

4. Photoshop

Photoshop remains the workhorse for concept paintovers, texture polish, masks, alphas, and presentation sheets.

Why It's Important

Fast image editing and painting unlock rapid exploration—refining textures, color grading turntables, and creating portfolio-ready layouts with clarity.

How to Improve Photoshop Skills

1. Custom brushes: Build sets for pores, hair, cloth weave, and painterly breakup.

2. Layer mastery: Masks, clipping layers, blend modes, and adjustment layers—non-destructive or bust.

3. Tablet workflow: Pressure curves, tilt, smoothing—tune it to your hand.

4. Anatomy and color: Better structure and better palettes make better characters. Period.

5. Tutorial-driven drills: Focused exercises on edges, materials, and paintover techniques.

6. Modern workflow note: Photoshop’s legacy 3D features are deprecated. Do modeling and texture authoring in 3D apps (e.g., Painter, Blender, Maya) and use Photoshop for paintovers, texture tweaks, and final comps.

How to Display Photoshop Skills on Your Resume

5. Blender

Blender is a free, open-source suite covering modeling, sculpting, texturing, rigging, animation, and rendering—lean, fast, and increasingly studio-ready.

Why It's Important

It offers a complete character pipeline with no license barrier, plus powerful tools like Geometry Nodes, Grease Pencil, and solid sculpting.

How to Improve Blender Skills

1. Sculpting: Practice anatomy, brush tuning, voxel remesh, and multires workflows.

2. Texturing and shading: UVs, PBR materials, node-based shaders, and lighting for readable forms.

3. Rigging and weights: Rigify, constraints, corrective shapes, and careful weight painting for clean deformations.

4. Animation basics: Timing, spacing, overlap—pose your characters to test deformation and appeal.

5. Add-ons and updates: Explore character-focused add-ons that speed retopo, hair, and baking tasks.

6. Community feedback: Share WIPs, get critique, iterate quickly.

How to Display Blender Skills on Your Resume

6. Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine (UE5) is a real-time platform for bringing characters to life in-engine with immediate feedback on lighting, materials, animation, and performance.

Why It's Important

Real-time lookdev with Lumen, film-quality meshes with Nanite, plus Control Rig, Sequencer, Groom, and IK Retargeter—perfect for testing and showcasing characters where they’ll actually live.

How to Improve Unreal Engine Skills

1. Import pipeline: Clean naming, scale consistency, correct skeletons, and sensible texture packing.

2. Materials: Build readable PBR shaders, use material instances, and add subtle variation—roughness tells stories.

3. Rigging and animation: Learn Control Rig for quick in-engine posing; use Sequencer for turntables and performance capture tests.

4. Real-time lighting: Lumen fundamentals, shadow quality, and exposure control to flatter forms without hiding flaws.

5. Optimization: LODs, retargeting hygiene, texture compression, and profiling to keep frame rates healthy.

6. Constant practice: Build showcase scenes—neutral studio lights, then a game-lit shot. Compare, refine.

How to Display Unreal Engine Skills on Your Resume

7. Unity

Unity is a flexible real-time engine for games, VR/AR, and interactive apps, with robust character import, animation, and material systems.

Why It's Important

It lets you see and tune characters in context—animation blending, shaders, lighting, and interaction—right where players will meet them.

How to Improve Unity Skills

1. Core workflow: Project setup, asset import settings, prefab discipline, and scene organization.

2. Modeling and texturing awareness: Create assets in Blender/Maya and Painter; export cleanly for URP/HDRP.

3. Rigging and animation: Mecanim basics, avatar configuration, retargeting, timeline-driven showcases.

4. Optimization: LODs, mesh and texture compression, shader variants, and light baking where appropriate.

5. Shaders: Shader Graph for stylized looks or advanced skin/eye materials in HDRP.

6. Community and iteration: Gather feedback early, adjust materials and lighting, measure performance.

How to Display Unity Skills on Your Resume

8. Marvelous Designer

Marvelous Designer simulates clothing with pattern-based workflows, producing natural drape, folds, and motion that sell realism fast.

Why It's Important

Real cloth behaves in complex ways. Pattern drafting plus accurate simulation gives garments that feel worn, weighted, and alive.

How to Improve Marvelous Designer Skills

1. Foundations: Pattern pieces, seam lines, fabric presets, particle distance, and pinning for control.

2. Learn real garment construction: Study tailoring. Understand darts, ease, grain, and why seams sit where they do.

3. Fabric behavior: Test settings for stiffness, stretch, and thickness; simulate, inspect, iterate.

4. Refine in sculpt: Send meshes to ZBrush or Blender for secondary folds and bespoke details.

5. Export cleanly: Retopo or quad remesh, sensible UVs, thickness decisions, and collision fixes.

6. Feedback loop: Pose your character, re-sim, tweak; repeat until folds read naturally.

How to Display Marvelous Designer Skills on Your Resume

9. 3ds Max

3ds Max offers robust modeling, retopology, rigging, and rendering tools—widely used across games, visualization, and film.

Why It's Important

Strong poly-modeling, dependable UVs, and mature rigging systems make it a reliable hub for character work in many pipelines.

How to Improve 3ds Max Skills

1. Core proficiency: Modifier stack discipline, instancing, smoothing groups, and scene cleanup.

2. Character modeling: Proportions, anatomy, silhouette control, and detail staging.

3. Texturing and shading: Material editor practice, PBR workflows, and baking setups.

4. Rigging: Joint placement, skinning strategy, corrective shapes, and lightweight control rigs.

5. ZBrush bridge: Move between high-res sculpt and clean low-poly with reliable baking.

6. Iterate and get critique: Post WIPs, apply feedback, tighten topology and deformation.

How to Display 3ds Max Skills on Your Resume

10. Mudbox

Mudbox provides straightforward high-res sculpting and 3D paint tools for detailing characters and creating texture maps.

Why It's Important

Its clean toolset and painting features make it a simple, direct option for sculpting and texturing without heavy overhead.

How to Improve Mudbox Skills

1. Sculpting fundamentals: Primary forms first, then secondary, then tertiary detail. Never jump the ladder.

2. Detail discipline: Use layers for pores, wrinkles, and scars; keep everything tweakable.

3. Custom brushes: Build and import brushes and stamps for faster, consistent detail passes.

4. Regular studies: Faces, hands, feet—repeat them. These areas expose weaknesses quickly.

5. Anatomy fluency: Bone landmarks, muscle flow, fat pads—understand how they shift in motion.

6. Feedback: Share updates, ask for harsh critique, adjust. Progress compounds.

How to Display Mudbox Skills on Your Resume

11. Houdini

Houdini is a procedural beast—great for complex setups, simulations, and now increasingly character-friendly with KineFX and powerful grooming.

Why It's Important

Procedural thinking means fast iteration, reusable rigs, and parametric control over hair, cloth, muscles, and deformation systems.

How to Improve Houdini Skills

1. Procedural mindset: Build node networks that are flexible, labeled, and easy to tweak later.

2. Character VFX: Cloth, hair grooms, muscle/skin sliding—simulate, cache, and art-direct results.

3. KineFX: Learn retargeting, rig building, and motion editing inside Houdini for robust control.

4. Debug and profile: Visualize data, inspect attributes, and keep networks performant.

5. Practice with purpose: Recreate a complex hair groom or layered cloth outfit; break it, fix it, polish it.

6. Stay current: New nodes, solvers, and grooming features roll in often—keep experimenting.

How to Display Houdini Skills on Your Resume

12. Arnold Renderer

Arnold is a physically based renderer trusted for clean, predictable results—great for showcasing skin, hair, eyes, and subtle material interplay.

Why It's Important

Lighting and shading sell form. Arnold’s quality and controls make skin SSS, fine displacement, and nuanced reflections feel convincing, not plastic.

How to Improve Arnold Renderer Skills

1. Efficient shading networks: Use Standard Surface, keep maps organized, and minimize complexity where possible.

2. Lighting craft: Classic three-point setups, soft area lights, and light linking to shape attention.

3. Subsurface scattering: Tune SSS radius and color for skin types; balance with roughness and spec lobes.

4. Displacement and normals: Use vector/displacement thoughtfully; match scales to sculpt details without bloating geo.

5. Sampling and noise: Start low, isolate noise sources, and raise samples surgically to save time.

6. AOVs: Output key passes—albedo, roughness, SSS, spec, AO, Z-depth—for flexible grading and fixes.

7. Lookdev discipline: Calibrated HDRIs and gray/skin shaders help you judge materials honestly.

How to Display Arnold Renderer Skills on Your Resume