Francisco Rojas | Character Modeler

Professional Summary

Character artist with years of experience taking assets from concept to production for games, film, and 3D printing. Experienced in sculpting, modeling, and texturing using Maya, ZBrush, and Substance Painter. Proven ability to lead teams and collaborate to deliver high-quality characters on schedule.

Work Experience

• CG Lead at Studio X AAU | San Francisco, CA | Sep 2023 - Dec 2024
  • Led and mentored a team of five artists, providing guidance on character modeling and texturing pipelines. Developed and conducted workshops focused on creating complex hard surface and organic models while utilizing industry-standard tools, including Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Arnold, and Unreal Engine. 
• Instructor at Escena, School of Animation | Mexico City | Jul 2019 - Aug 2021
  • Instructed college-level courses for groups of about ten adult students both on-site and online.
  • Designed and taught an introductory course on ZBrush and
• Freelance Character Artist | Orlando, FL | Jul 2019 - Aug 2021
  • Provided services of sculpting, modeling, texturing, and rigging 3D characters for video games. 
  • Sculpted and modeled all 10 opponents along with environmental props for the VR boxing game The Thrill of the Fight.
  • Worked with the Unity game engine to implement the optimized character models, textures, and hair cards.
• Character Artist Internship at Sony Interactive Entertainment | San Diego, CA | May 2018 - Aug 2018
  • Worked with the character artist team that consisted of eight members, including myself, in modeling crowd hair and props for the game MLB The Show 2019. 
  • Implemented player faces into the engine using photogrammetry and Maya to retopologize the models.

Education

• Master of Fine Arts in Animation and Visual Effects at Academy of Art University | San Francisco, CA | Jun 2022 - May 2025
• Bachelor of Science in Computer Animation at Full Sail University | Winter Park, FL | Aug 2015 - Jul 2017

Skills

• Technical Skills
  • ZBrush, Maya, Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, Mari, Photoshop, xGen, Hair Cards, Unreal Engine, Unity, Marmoset Toolbag, Arnold, Redshift
• Artistic and Production Skills
  • Character surfacing and materials, real-time asset optimization, high-poly to low-poly baking, UV unwrapping, PBR texturing workflow, organic and hard-surface modeling, sculpting stylized and realistic characters, digital anatomy (human and creature), hair and fur grooming, photogrammetry cleanup, topology and edge flow for animation
• Pipeline and Workflow Skills
  • Game-ready asset creation, shader setup, rendering for portfolio and production, documentation of character pipelines, version control integration, collaboration with rigging and technical artists, asset implementation into game engines (Unreal, Unity), performance optimization 
• Soft Skills
  • Team leadership and mentorship, cross-disciplinary communication, problem solving, feedback incorporation, iterative development, time management, adaptability in remote/hybrid environments
• Languages
  • English (fluent), Spanish (fluent)