Earlier this week, I shared my thoughts and ideas on the whole concept of VTubing with you—so now, I wanted to share more on how the process of making my avatar actually went!
When I first started streaming, I went with a really basic build-your-own-VTuber model that I bought off Etsy for around $30. It seemed like a really reasonable, low-effort way to see if I actually liked VTubing enough to invest more of my time and energy into it.
And well, $30 was much more doable than the thousands that some people spend on them, I figured.
It did work well enough, but after a few sessions, I had started to figure out what I liked, what I didn’t, and what I’d do differently with the next generation of my avatar.
- It didn’t blink or track eye movement, and I wanted to figure out how to do that for games like League of Legends, where you’re constantly looking around at the map and people want to see what you’re looking at
- It was pretty limited in how the mouth moved, and didn’t always notice when I was talking
- It struggled with head turning, and often would lean over like it was trying to invent a new dance move when I looked over at Sekan at his own desk
So I set out on a mission to figure out what I could do to get what I wanted out of an avatar.
The creation conundrum
All in all, the idea of creating my own avatar was both appealing and intimidating. I’ve always been the type of person who wants to be able to do things herself, even if I didn’t know how to do them before, but creating an avatar from scratch seemed like it might be a little too far out there for me.
It was so intimidating to think about designing my own model, especially if I needed to use software like Blender to do it. I used Blender back in the day to make our wedding cake topper, and it was rough enough figuring out how to use it for models that already existed, let alone ones that didn’t!
As I researched how people typically create avatars, one of the pieces of software I landed on was something called VRoid Studio. It’s a free goodie from Steam that lets people create 3D models for all kinds of things, and it seemed like a good alternative to something as intense as Blender.
So how could I make what I had in mind?
Building the base
The first thing I had to figure out was how to work with the base model to create my avatar. That ended up taking a few forms:
- Modeling things like facial features and body shape to get the shapes and proportions I wanted
- Tweaking expressions using those facial features so they weren’t so extreme
- Detailing the skin with shading and highlights to get the depth I wanted
The skin detailing was probably the most complex part of the whole process because it involved carefully adjusting the layers with where I wanted highlights to sit.
FUN FACT
You might think a flat skin tone would be easier to design, but it isn’t! It takes just as much to make a 3D model look flat as it does to make it look 3D, interestingly enough.
Adding the extras
For me, the biggest thing was that I wanted the hair to look nice. I was never super happy with the options on my previous model, and just went for the one that looked the most like what I actually have on my head.
With the new model, I wanted to draw hair that looked more natural, but still fit the design of the model. It took a few days for me to figure out how to construct the hair using the different components; back for the hair drawn back into the ponytail, front for the bangs, extensions for the ponytail, extras for the flower.
It was fun figuring it out, though, and it gave me the idea to build a modular set with an interchangeable bun and ponytail so I could mix it up depending on the vibe that day.
One thing I do still need to figure out is clothing.
All I’ve really learned so far is how intense it is to try and create clothes; it seems like it should be simple enough since they basically origami their way around your avatar from PNG files, but the geometry makes absolutely zero sense to me.
Getting it working
After design, I had quite a few adventures in getting the model to work, too. My original model had used VTube Studio, but that wouldn’t work for a VRoid creation because of file incompatibilities.
I ended up trying out a few others to get the model to work, mostly on recommendations from the research I’d been doing.
- Animaze had some cool features, including arm animation, but seemed really heavy on my poor computer
- VTuber Editor had some good options for scenes and outfits, but wanted me to pay for a lot of stuff
I ended up trying out the base software that so many of the fancier ones use, VSeeFace, and it’s my favourite so far because it has settings that let you choose your model’s sensitivity, so it’s easier to run avatars and intense games at the same time.
After all, I’ve seen people have to use things like PNGtubers to get games like Path of Exile to work properly because it’s too heavy for their system to run both. So I like the option of having a “toaster mode” for my avatar, so I can prioritize the game when I need to.
YOUR TURN
