My Accidental Dive into VTubing

At first, I didn't really imagine myself doing Twitch streams but I went ahead and gave it a spin. Once my trial phase got me to Twitch Affiliate, I knew I couldn't stop there...

If you've been into my older streams, you know that I have no camera on and that I don't really consider showing myself on cam, ever. I get to keep my anonymity, in a way, but that means you'll just listen to me talk and have nothing to see aside from the games I play. I'm pretty sure everyone's clueless of what's happening because you don't see anything and I'm still prone to lots of instances of dead air (or accidentally muting myself). To me, that's not really the kind of stream experience I want to deliver so I decided to aim to have something for you to look at.

But using my avatar didn't feel enough. I wanted to look alive but not really expose myself. The closest thing to consider was to get a virtual avatar - which wasn't something I on the table right off the bat! What's a VTuber anyway?

A VTuber is a streamer who uses a virtual avatar. As you may have expected, it originated in Japan and ever since the pandemic started, more and more people have hopped into the trend. Most audience come from the anime and gaming side of things.

With that in mind, I had doubts about being one. Do I have to act cute? Am I going to play a certain role? Do I need to learn Japanese? It turns out I had so much impressions about VTubing and that was what was stopping me.

Honestly though. All I had to do was to go for it.

I did my research and downloaded the software (VRoid Studio) needed to start but, it looks like my attention span isn't prepared for all the footages I needed to watch to help me get started with creating my avatar.

There's so much to look into and I didn't know how to finish it the soonest time possible. I badly wanted to have one but I know I wasn't going to settle for less. That's how nitpicky I am with everything I do. Lurking around Fiverr just intensified my desire to get my avatar. I had to do something but cash is rather slow these days. Was I willing to try and sell some assets away? What am I going to do to finally become alive?

Luckily, help came into my way and I managed to secure funds for the avatar commission. In exchange for that help, a challenge was posed for me to do better with whatever I'm doing right now. It was something I'm glad to accept despite knowing that I could make or break myself in the process. I think it was time to take another leap of faith for myself.

You'd think now that there's someone to do the actual work for the avatar, everything's going to be smooth sailing. Well, sure. But not really.

My model creator, Aesop, had to use a picture of my character which didn't have a lower half so I had to send my Minecraft skin as a secondary reference too.

Aesop has done a great job for creating Arc v1 but the more I looked at my avatar, I realized I was aesthetically lacking a bunch of things.

Arc looked too plain. Aiming for a minimalistic design for an RPG character was one mistake I made and I didn't realize that until I paused and looked hard enough. What was I even thinking when I did this on picrew?

I ended up getting fixated with dressing up and dressing down for one whole week and here's what I finally settled with.

Added bandage to the left arm as it made more sense to me - these arms were made to pack some punches! To go with the modern times, I also threw in a mini hoodie too. I had to temporarily part ways with the back accessory and the shoulder guard but once I learn how to add more features to my avatar, I'd most likely spend a lot of time updating my model.

Once I got satisfied or tired with the changes I've made, I decided not to keep everyone else waiting and did my VTuber debut on Twitch about 4 days ago. Here's a clip of how I revealed my avatar on stream:

I'd take this as a successful milestone to my VTuber journey. I didn't realize there's so much more to discover about the craft and I hope you'd be there to watch me reach more. If you have already been following along, thank you! I wouldn't push my limits if it weren't for your presence and support. If you haven't seen me around yet, do check me out on Twitch! I aim to do at least 2 Rising Star giveaway episodes per week and more gaming streams.

You've reached the end of this post. Thank you for your time!