Waqas Ahmad

Senior 3D Character Artist / Rigging Artist

Mega Cat Studios • Fulltime

Aug 2024 - Present • 1 yr 9 mos

Worked as a Senior 3D Rigging Artist in game production pipelines, contributing to character rigging, technical art, pipeline development, and production-ready asset delivery across multiple recognized titles, including Backyard Baseball, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and SpongeBob-related projects. My core work focused on building game-ready character rigs in Blender, including full body rigs, facial rig workflows, IK/FK systems, shape keys/blendshapes, prop and accessory rigging, clean deformation, weight painting, and Unity-ready export support. A major part of my role was developing proper rigging workflows that could be followed by the wider team. I helped create and improve rigging methods, file structures, hierarchy standards, export practices, and character setup processes so the team could work faster and with fewer technical issues. I also developed Blender tools and automation workflows that reduced repetitive production tasks significantly. Some processes that previously required around 2 hours of manual work were reduced to roughly 10 minutes, helping save man-hours and making the pipeline more consistent across multiple characters and assets. Beyond individual rig creation, I contributed to building scalable rigging systems, improving animator-friendly controls, testing character deformation, solving technical rig issues, and supporting artists with rig-friendly asset preparation. This experience strengthened my production mindset: a good rig is not only about controls and bones. It needs to be clean, reusable, export-ready, animator-friendly, and efficient enough for a real team pipeline.