An Animator brings static assets to life by designing and implementing movement for characters, creatures, props, and cameras across 2D and 3D pipelines. Day-to-day work involves keyframing and refining motion in tools like Maya, Blender, or Unreal Engine, collaborating with art directors, riggers, and game designers to ensure animations feel believable and serve the project's tone. Depending on specialization, they may focus on character performance and facial animation, technical systems like state machines and blend trees, or real-time gameplay locomotion and combat. They review their own work against reference footage, iterate based on feedback, and deliver polished assets that meet technical constraints such as polygon budgets and frame-rate targets.
Key responsibilities
Keyframe and polish character, creature, and prop animations to brief
Build and maintain animation state machines and blend trees in game engines
Collaborate with riggers to identify and resolve rig limitations
Review animation against live-action or motion-capture reference
Implement animations in-engine and troubleshoot playback issues
Iterate on work based on art direction and gameplay feedback
Skills & tools
Autodesk Maya
Blender
Unreal Engine
Unity
Motion capture cleanup
Keyframe animation
Rigging fundamentals
Animation state machines
2D animation (frame-by-frame / cut-out)
Principles of animation
Adobe Animate
Spine 2D
Education & background
Portfolio-driven; a degree in animation, fine art, or game design is common but not universally required.
Career path
Junior Animator → Animator → Senior Animator → Lead Animator → Animation Director, or lateral specialization into Technical Animator or Character Animator.
Salary
Median
$114K
USD/yr
Average
$117K
USD/yr
Minimum
$52K
USD/yr
Maximum
$222K
USD/yr
Based on 16 disclosed USD postings · Animator, USD-disclosed
