Christian Major

Christian Major

Lead 3D Hair / Groom Artist

Raleigh, NC · Open to remote & contract work
artstation.com/christianmajor

Professional Summary

Lead 3D hair and groom artist with four plus years of professional production experience delivering game-ready hair, facial hair, and creature fur for AAA and AA titles. I operate fluently across both real-time hair cards and cinematic strand-based pipelines. Promoted to hair team lead, directing a team of four and owning client-facing delivery from blockout through in-engine validation.

Core Skills & Tools

Grooming / Hair XGen (strand-based grooms, scalp baking), UE5 Groom Assets (Alembic export, MetaHuman Groom Exporter), Houdini MetaHuman Groom Pipeline, Hair Cards (layered card placement, GS Curves, tricount optimization)

DCC Houdini, Maya, ZBrush

Texturing Fibershop and XGen Arnold, Substance Painter, Affinity Photo/Designer, Photoshop

Engine Unreal Engine 5 (Material Instances, Groom Binding, Asset Validation, In-Engine Lookdev), plus proprietary client engines

Rendering Arnold, Marmoset Toolbag (review renders), Unreal Engine

Pipeline / Production Perforce (P4V), Trello, Slack, client feedback loops, team review & feedback

Familiar with Yeti (creature fur grooms)

Professional Experience

Art Bully Productions

Raleigh, NC · 2022 – 2026

3D Hair Artist → Hair Team Lead

Delivered game-ready hair, facial hair, and creature fur across 13+ AAA, AA, and licensed game projects. Promoted to team lead on a large-scale real-time character hair project.

Hair Team Lead, Chronicles: Medieval (Raw Power Games). Led a team of four hair artists delivering 40 hairstyles for the title and personally authored 10 of them. Ran daily reviews, gave technical feedback, and managed all client submissions through the blockout, client approval, hair cards, and engine review approval loop.
Built and maintained the studio's real-time hair-card pipeline end to end: sculpt blockout in ZBrush, unique texture authoring, layered card placement in Maya and ZBrush, and UE5 in-engine validation.
Established asset, material, and texture naming conventions and the client approval feedback loop used across the team.

Selected Projects

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Game (released 2023). Hero hair, beard, and eyebrows for villain and victim characters (Wyatt / Skeet Ulrich, Bones / Ben Mosley); 11 hair-card variant updates and 11 outfit variant textures in Substance Painter, tuning roughness and metallic values after in-engine review; 4 female hairstyles for the Rush Week cast. On the technical side, imported character meshes, applied skinning rules, and handled engine integration in Unreal; configured clothing and hair as physics assets from placeholder meshes in Maya; resolved outfit clipping by adjusting physics collision areas; and partnered with riggers and the lead character artist to validate and combine character assets before import.
Halloween. Created the hero Michael Myers mask hair asset.
Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic (cinematic). Hero lookdev development for the groom asset.
Chronos: The New Dawn. Eight cat fur variants with a parallax-occlusion fur shader set up in Unreal; Substance Painter fur texturing.
Remnant from the Ashes 2. Dog fur groom and texture; 3 NPC children hairstyles.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Post-launch, unreleased R&D hair assets.
Unannounced AAA sci-fi RPG (under NDA). XGen strand-based grooms including an afro-textured fade groom plus cards and a non-human / alien character groom (hair, beard, eyelashes); delivered Maya to Unreal via the MetaHuman Groom Exporter pipeline.
Unannounced horror title (under NDA). 2 playable-character hairstyles including a punk style.
Death Ground. 3 dinosaur feather grooms (Maya, Arnold, Unreal, Yeti).

Education

Full Sail University. BS, Computer Animation. Graduated with honors.
Academy of Classical Design. Classical drawing & painting study (2009).
North Carolina State University. BA, Arts Applications, Visual Arts (2005).

Professional Summary

Core Skills & Tools

Professional Experience

Education

Trailers