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Five-stage game-ready asset production pipeline for a pedagogically controlled 3D Virtual Teacher avatar

Design · All designs
Evidence · no claims cited

Description

The prototype's Virtual Teacher avatar was manually authored rather than sourced from a pre-packaged library, to give pedagogical control over appearance and expressive affordances. The pipeline runs through Character Creator, ZBrush sculpt refinement, Substance Painter material authoring, Mixamo auto-rigging and animation, and OBJ export. The authors treat the avatar as part of the interaction channel, in which "facial expressions, turn-taking cues, and lip synchronization are treated as communicative signals that shape how students interpret the tutor's epistemic stance and instructional intent".

Design Implications

Context

Requirements

  • Face mesh must support clear lip articulation to avoid degrading comprehension during voice-based tutoring
  • Polygon count, texture sizes, and shader complexity must keep the asset computationally tractable on consumer hardware for stable frame rates under concurrency

Constraints

  • Texture resolution was balanced to preserve facial readability while limiting VRAM and bandwidth overhead for mobile and consumer devices

Target Learners

  • school students interacting with the avatar on smartphones and PCs

Learning Goals

  • legible embodied communication of tutor state and instructional intent

Claims

Examples

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Key Sources

  • Lorenzo Stacchio, Michele Giordano, Daniele Berardini, Primo Zingaretti, Emanuele Frontoni. (2026). ELEVATE: Designing Human-Centered GenAI Virtual Tutors for Scalable and Inclusive Education. arXiv preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30662
Page metadata
Field Value
type design
id elevate-avatar-asset-production-pipeline
title Five-stage game-ready asset production pipeline for a pedagogically controlled 3D Virtual Teacher avatar
description The prototype's Virtual Teacher avatar was manually authored rather than sourced from a pre-packaged library, to give pedagogical control over appearance and expressive affordances.
status review
generated by process:settle-candidates on 2026-10-10
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — lorenzo-stacchio-2026

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