About
I’m a Senior Digital Character Artist working in AAA games since 2006, with experience spanning concept development, character production, and final rendering. I’ve contributed to main characters, narrative characters, and NPCs alongside talented teams, while continuing to refine my craft through personal projects, visual storytelling, and technical exploration.
I also explore how emerging technologies, including AI, can support creative ideas and new ways of working. Each project presents its own process and tools, making clear what I created by hand and where AI contributed.
Experience
Collaborated with the art team since early production to support character goals, working under the project’s creative and art direction to contribute to early 3D concepts and test models for visual inspiration.
Supported the course instructor during character art labs, answering student questions and helping students with their 3D modeling workflows.
Joined the core team during pre-production to help develop an early version of the main protagonist, delivering high-resolution assets within franchise guidelines.
Assisted the character art team late in production with high-resolution modeling, texturing, baking for some main narrative heads.
Worked alongside the character team on hard-surface modeling, organic modeling, texturing, and 3D concepting tasks.
Worked with the character team on main and narrative characters under technical constraints.
Joined the character art team late in production to assist with the development of some narrative characters and NPCs.
Worked with the character team on main and narrative characters within production pipeline constraints.
Worked with the Art Director and a concept artist during pre-production, utilizing provided Egyptian historical references to help translate concepts into the initial 3D visual style execution.
Joined the character art team late in production to assist with the modeling of one secondary narrative character.
Worked with the team to assist with modeling for the main protagonist and supported various digital sculpture projects.
I started as a Junior Character Artist assisting highly talented senior character artists with props and NPCs, and was trusted over time to work alongside them on main and co-op narrative characters.
Special thanks to Pascal Beaulieu, Hau Nghiep Phan, Horia Trandafir, Daniel Bordeleau, Jacques Marcoux, Jean-Francois Arseneau, The Chinh Ngo, and all the team for their deep passion for the craft, generous knowledge sharing, and invaluable artistic and technical guidance that truly launched my professional journey and deepened my passion for character art.
Software Skills
ZBrush
Blender
Autodesk 3ds Max3ds Max
Marvelous DesignerMarvelous
Substance 3D PainterSubstance Painter
Adobe PhotoshopPhotoshop
Autodesk Maya (basics)Maya (basics)
Wrap (R3DS)
xNormal
Marmoset ToolbagMarmoset
Unreal EngineUnreal
Perforce
Adobe Premiere ProPremiere Pro
DaVinci Resolve
Anthropic Claude / CodeClaude / Code
OpenAI ChatGPTChatGPT
Google GeminiGemini
Perplexity
Grok
HiggsfieldEducation
My experience spans a broad range of 3D workflows, with a particular focus on character creation.
Languages
3D Art Portfolio
My name is Mager Kamel Aquino. I’m a professional Digital Character Artist with experience dating back to 2006, creating 3D characters from concept development to final rendering, with hands-on experience across the stages in between, including AAA game production.
This portfolio brings together selected professional contributions and personal work, featuring characters, creatures, and 3D concepts across a range of artistic styles and production environments.
AI Art Portfolio
This section explores how I use AI image and video tools to develop creative ideas through artistic direction, experimentation, and many iterations. The challenge is bringing a specific vision into focus, refining details and maintaining consistency without losing what already works. I bring my artistic experience to that process while learning the tools, making projects possible that I couldn’t produce alone. I present this work separately from my 3D portfolio so the role of AI is clear.
Tool Ideas Portfolio
I’ve been working with 3D and creative software since 2006. Along the way, I’ve often imagined tools I wished existed and ideas I wanted to explore, without the programming background to build them. AI is opening that door, giving me ways to experiment with ideas I previously couldn’t develop on my own.
This section brings together those explorations, from stories and creative concepts to scripts and potential apps, with images, videos, and prototypes showing their progress. I approach them with the same care as my artwork, learning new skills and discovering what AI can and cannot do. I hope something here sparks an idea for someone else. If an experiment becomes a usable tool, I’ll make it available here.