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

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