Technical Artist Resume
Skills & ATS Keywords

Budget roughly 22 to 38 named tools across 6 to 8 categorized rows. Under 20 reads thin once you pass Junior; over 42 reads as a checklist nobody actually wired together. Each token has to resurface in a shipped art-tech bullet, an HDA or rig you authored, or a tool an artist on your team actually opens. If you cannot trace it back to content that shipped, take it off the file.

Maya, Python, the engine you ship against (Unreal or Unity), HLSL on shader work, Houdini for procedural depth, ZBrush in the modeling chain, the material editor you author in (Unreal Material Editor or Shader Graph), and Perforce on AAA pipelines are the hard floors. Niagara or VFX Graph, MotionBuilder, USD, Substance, MEL, and PBR / look-dev round out the supporting band. Houdini Engine + HDAs, rig systems work, ACES / OCIO, and shipped-title credits separate the senior pile at AAA studios.

Pair them: the DCC you author the asset in plus the engine the asset ships into. Maya plus Unreal reads natural at most AAA studios, Maya plus Unity on stylized or mobile titles, 3ds Max plus Unreal at certain studio lineages, Blender plus Unity on indie pipelines, Houdini plus Unreal whenever procedural is the load-bearing piece. An art-tech lead wants the chain you actually pushed content through, not a roster of every package you have installed. If your pipeline straddles two DCCs through a unified USD layer, name both and put the primary first.

Right under the Profile Summary, ahead of Work Experience. Art-tech leads scan the first screen inside roughly eight seconds and the studio ATS generation reads keywords more reliably when the section sits high and clearly labeled. A Maya token, a Houdini reference, an HLSL string, or a Niagara mention living in the Profile Summary or the top Skills row outranks the same word stashed at the bottom of page two. Keep it to 6 to 8 labeled rows, then back every row with a shipped art-tech bullet that names the DCC, the engine, and the artist-iteration win.

Technical Artist sits at the seam between Art and Engineering: look-dev shaders, content pipelines, rig systems, Houdini HDAs, Python and MEL tools, validators, and the artist-facing UX that turns a renderer into something a 40-artist content team can actually drive. Graphics Engineer authors the renderer itself: pipeline class, HLSL passes, lighting, post-processing, GPU profiling. Engine Programmer owns the runtime underneath: ECS, allocators, the job system, the RHI, asset streaming. Game Developer is the gameplay-layer generalist on Blueprint, C++, or C#. If your week is in Maya Python, Houdini HDAs, shader graphs, RenderDoc captures for art reasons, and rig-deformation reviews with the animation lead, this is the page.

Stack six TA postings inside the studio lane and discipline mix you want next: AAA open-world art-pipeline TA, live-service shader TA, stylized indie look-dev, mobile F2P performance TA, cinematic narrative rigging TA, or a Houdini-heavy procedural TA at a publisher studio. Underline every DCC, engine, shader tool, rig system, procedural package, and pipeline tool that recurs in three or more. The overlapping set becomes the load-bearing backbone of your TA file. Walk it across your Skills rows and your shipped art-tech bullets, close the honest gaps, then push the PDF through an ATS Checker before you submit.

Yes, NDA permitting. A Technical Artist file that names the shipped title, the engine, the discipline you owned (shader library, rig system, Houdini HDA pack, content validator, look-dev rig), and one artist-iteration win reads as senior on a single paragraph. A file that lists Maya, Python, HLSL, and Houdini with no shipped credit and no artist-impact number reads as a portfolio-page reprint. Where the title is under NDA, describe the production class, the platform, and the discipline. The portfolio link belongs in the contact row, and the ArtStation breakdowns or YouTube tool walk-throughs behind it are the highest-signal piece on the page.