# Technical Skills Matrix Specific skills for each role in [[Roles and Hiring Plan]]. Use these lists for job descriptions and interview checklists. Training and tutorials come next, in each folder's *Tutorials* note. ## Character art Stage 2 in depth (sculpt, Mesh to MetaHuman, Creator, MetaHuman for Maya, grooms, cloth): [[Stage 2 — Likeness and Body Skills]] **Character artist (MetaHuman / Maya)** - MetaHuman Creator in UE 5.8: parametric body, face blending, skin, teeth, eyes, custom lighting preview - **Mesh to MetaHuman** from sculpts or scans (head and body, arbitrary topology) - Sculpting in ZBrush or Maya; retopology; UV layout - Likeness from photographs and portraits; photogrammetry cleanup (RealityScan or similar) - Skin look-dev: unbaked textures and material control in MetaHuman 5.8 - LOD authoring: Cine vs Optimized assemblies, texture budgets for Quest and phones - Maya ↔ Unreal round trip (FBX, USD); MetaHuman for Maya **Groom artist** - UE Groom (Alembic) authoring; XGen or Houdini hair workflows - Strand hair for kiosks; **hair cards** for Quest, Vive and phones - Period hairstyles and facial hair from references **Costume designer / cloth artist** - Period costume research - Marvelous Designer or CLO patterning; simulation; baking to MetaHuman Outfits so garments refit across bodies - Fabric materials (wool, linen, silk) at realistic scale **Environment artist** - Architectural reconstruction from HABS drawings and site photos - Nanite, Lumen / Lumen Lite, MegaLights (production-ready in 5.8) for kiosk; baked lighting for Quest - Modular kits reused across rooms; draw-call and texture budgets for standalone headsets ## Animation and performance **Technical animator / rigger** - MetaHuman Animator: iPhone/TrueDepth, stereo head-mounted camera, webcam/mono video, **single-camera body capture (Windows)** - Live Link Face (iOS and Android), RTSP streaming input - MetaHuman DNA and RigLogic (open source under MIT since 5.8); Control Rig, Direct Mesh Controls, Control Rig Physics - Retargeting (IK Retargeter), animation blueprints, blend spaces for idles and gestures - Maya: mocap cleanup, HumanIK, skin weights (ngSkinTools in Maya 2027), FBX/USD export - Baking and compressing animation for mobile (USDZ/glTF skeletal animation) **Mocap technician** - Inertial suits (e.g. Rokoko, Xsens) or optical stages (Vicon, OptiTrack) - Calibration, solving, data cleanup; syncing face, body and audio timecode ## Engine and platforms **Unreal engineer** - UE 5.8 C++ and Blueprint; Sequencer; state machines for the program clock - Audio: MetaSounds, submixes, captions and subtitles - Pixel Streaming 2 and its signalling/front-end infrastructure - Packaging for Windows; crash reporting; kiosk auto-start and watchdogs - Source control (Perforce or Git LFS); build automation (Unreal Automation Tool / BuildGraph) **XR engineer** - OpenXR in Unreal; Meta XR plugin; Android XR plugin; Vive OpenXR - Performance on mobile GPUs: forward shading, fixed foveation, Application SpaceWarp, texture compression (ASTC) - Comfort design: seated mode, teleport, vignettes - Fleet: ArborXR or ManageXR enrollment, kiosk/shared mode, remote app updates **visionOS developer** (only if in scope) - Swift, SwiftUI, RealityKit, Reality Composer Pro, USD - Or Unity 6 + PolySpatial (URP, Shader Graph only); full-immersion Unreal builds - Xcode on Apple silicon; TestFlight; enterprise distribution **Mobile AR engineer** - ARKit + RealityKit (iOS); ARCore (Android); or Unity AR Foundation for both - USDZ (Quick Look) and glTF (Scene Viewer) authoring and optimization - Image targets on plaques; ARCore Geospatial API and VPS coverage checks; GPS fallback - Offline caching, battery and thermal testing in sunlight - App Store and Google Play release; App Clips / Instant Apps for low-friction entry ## Mind and voice **AI / conversation engineer** - Retrieval-augmented generation: chunking by dated entry, embeddings, hybrid keyword + vector search, citation IDs - Policy layer: cutoff enforcement, refusal lists, trauma protocol, companionship ban; separate from the persona prompt - LLM APIs (hosted) and a small on-prem model for offline or school-filtered venues - Streaming speech: ASR (speech-to-text), streaming TTS, barge-in; end-to-end latency budgets - Driving faces from audio: MetaHuman audio-driven animation or NVIDIA Audio2Face-3D (open source) - Evaluation harnesses: golden question sets, regression on every corpus change, red-team suites - Logging and dashboards (questions, corpus hits, refusals), privacy-safe analytics **Conversation designer / narrative writer** - Writing in period voice from primary sources; monologue structure - Question-bank design (400–800 items) with citations and refusal flags - Chautauqua format: in character, questions in character, out of character - Accessibility writing: plain-language captions, children's cut **Voice director / audio** - Casting and dialect coaching; voice-bible sessions (calm, anger, humor, public address) - Actor contracts for synthetic voice use; locking a TTS voice so it cannot drift - Spatial audio, room tone, loudness standards for kiosks and headsets ## Research and rights **Historian of record / corpus editor** - Primary-source editing, transcription, citation standards - Separating own words, contemporaries and period knowledge; writing D-notes (contested facts, silences) - Blind review of generated answers **Rights counsel** - Collections and reproduction agreements; actor digital-replica clauses; right of publicity by state; trademarks ## Operations **Kiosk / AV integrator** - Windows kiosk hardening, auto-login, watchdogs, remote management - Displays (portrait 55–86 inch, LED, holographic cabinets), microphone arrays with echo cancellation, depth or presence sensors - Network: offline mode, captive Wi-Fi SSIDs, school allowlists **QA** - Device matrix testing (kiosk, Quest 3/3S, Vive, Vision Pro, iPhone, mid-range Android) - Red-team prompt runs; caption accuracy; comfort testing ## Shared across the team - Version control and asset naming conventions - Reading a rights map before using any image or text - The ground rules: [[Ground Rules — Historical Virtual Humans]]