3D Character Artist / Rigger for Pixel Art Game (Blender + Mixamo)

NOTE: We are seeking candidates mostly in Philippines or south-east Asia close to our studio timezone. Thank you The project We're building a multiplayer online game with a pixel art style, and we render our character sprites from 3D, not hand-drawn frame by frame. We need a Blender artist to own the character side of that pipeline: take concept art through to a clean, rigged, animated 3D character with gear attached, delivered as tidy .blend files. You don't need to write any code. We have an automated render pipeline that turns your .blend files into sprite sheets. Your job is the 3D craft; our scripts handle the rest. What we do need is someone tidy, because your files feed directly into that pipeline and it only works if they're structured consistently. This is an on-going role. Once the first character is through, there's a steady stream of characters, gear and custom animations behind it. What you'll do Concept to low-poly mesh. We supply concept art. You run it through an image-to-3D tool (Meshy, etc) and do one-time cleanup in Blender to get a clean, low-poly humanoid mesh. Expect messy topology out of these tools; fixing that is a core part of the job. Rig via Mixamo. Auto-rig the mesh, pull in the standard retargeted clip library (idle, walk, slash, draw, collapse, etc.), fix any bad deformations, and keyframe a small number of custom clips in Blender (e.g. a bow wind-up, a brace pose) that join the same library. Gear attachment. Weapon and equipment meshes parented to bones - sword to hand, shield to forearm. Set up once per item so gear follows every animation permanently, without clipping through the body during motion. Deliver to our file structure. We give you a template .blend with the collections, naming conventions and scale already set up. You match it. Gear stays in its own collections (never merged into the body), animations are clean named Actions, every character shares the same origin and rest orientation. Deliverables per character Cleaned, rigged mesh as a .blend source file matching our template Animation library: Mixamo clips retargeted plus agreed custom clips keyframed Gear set up and parented for the agreed items Your file runs through our automated render pipeline without edits and the sprites come out clean. That's the acceptance test, and we'll show you how to run it yourself with one command. You should have Strong Blender skills: modelling, cleanup, rigging and keyframe animation Experience with Mixamo or equivalent auto-rig and retargeting workflows Low-poly character experience, ideally characters that read clearly at small sizes Tidy file habits: consistent naming, sensible collections, no mystery objects left in the scene Ability to work to a spec and match a template exactly Nice-to-haves Experience with image-to-3D tools (Meshy, Tripo, Hunyoan3D) Pixel art sensibility: strong silhouettes, poses that read at 96 pixels Game dev background, especially with sprite-based or pre-rendered art styles Studio pipeline experience where your files had to pass automated checks How we'll work First milestone: one character through the full chain: mesh, rig, three animations, one gear item, files passing our render pipeline. Fixed price for that milestone, then on-going work at an agreed rate if it goes well. To apply Tell us briefly: A low-poly character you've made and rigged (link or screenshots, viewport shots are fine) A time your Blender files had to match someone else's structure or spec, and how you handled it What's the most common problem you've seen with Mixamo auto-rigs, and how do you fix it ps. Applications that don't answer these three will be skipped, it's how we filter out copy-paste bids.