3D Character Artist in Unreal

About Us

Hidden Acorn is a new game studio based in the San Francisco Bay Area building our first title: a competitive, PvP real-time strategy game launching across all major platforms. We're a small, ambitious team and we are looking for talented, passionate people who'll build it with us from the ground up.

About the Role

Hidden Acorn is looking for a talented Character Artist to help us build the roster at the heart of our RTS. Characters are the soul of this genre — players pick their favorites, study their animations, argue about their designs — and we want to make units worth that kind of attention. You'll be working closely with our Creative Director to bring heroes, units, and creatures from concept to game-ready asset in Unreal Engine 5, helping us build a visual language that's consistent, readable, and genuinely exciting to look at. 

What You'll Do

• Work with the Creative Director to create concept art and sculpt highly detailed heroes, units, and creatures that form the visual backbone of our roster 
• Sculpt high-poly characters in ZBrush: heroes, units, and creatures
• Retopologize to clean game-res meshes with sensible polycount and edge flow for deformation
• Texture in a PBR workflow: albedo, roughness/metallic, normals, channel-packed masks
• Set up and maintain assets in Unreal Engine 5, including imports, LODs, and material instances, so characters are ready to drop into the game 
• Collaborate with the Creative Director on faction design, costume language, and visual hierarchy
• Maintain consistency across a growing roster so the game's art feels cohesive as the character library expands 
• Help document new and existing asset pipeline conventions to streamline processes for artists across the team 

What We're Looking For

• 3–5 years of character art experience with at least one shipped or near-shipped project
• Highly skilled at sculpting, retopology, UV layout, and PBR texturing for real-time characters 
• Ability to execute a visual style consistently across a roster — hand-painted, photorealistic, or stylized 
• Working knowledge of Unreal Engine 5 at a pipeline level: importing, material setup, LOD configuration 
• Strong portfolio showing characters that read clearly at a distance; Examples in RTS, MOBA, or strategy game work are preferred 

Nice to Have

• Rigging and/or animation experience
• Experience designing within a faction or faction system (distinct visual languages per team/race/side)
• Concept art skills at a thumbnail/ideation level
• Familiarity with VAT or ISM workflows for crowd rendering

What We Offer

• Your work will be among the most visible things in the game. Players will spend more time looking at your characters than almost anything else
• Small, passionate team with a culture of adding new ideas. Your voice matters regardless of what role you're in
• Remote-friendly
• Competitive compensation based on experience

Please email your resume and portfolio to [email protected]