For a full-length video walkthrough based on this article, watch my YouTube video.
So you want to try out this virtual avatar thing, and you’ve heard of Live2D? It was originally developed in 2010 for visual novels, and its easy workflow allowed to it be quickly adopted by Vtubers. If you can do image manipulation and understand some principles of animation, you can figure it out pretty quickly.
That said, the process is arguably more difficult than trying to be a 3D Vtuber. This is because the 3D Vtuber scene is loaded with template sheets and base models that you can use, while going 2D still has a requirement of making your own personal drawing.
My Vtuber guide only briefly described the Live2D process in a footnote, so I’ll outline the critical steps in a bit more detail.
Getting your Portrait Art
No skipping this step. But we can cheat a little bit.
In what may be the hardest step for some, the first step is to obtain a portrait image of your intended avatar, either by drawing it yourself or commissioning an artist.
Ideally, you should try to keep the next step in mind during the drawing process and make it into the desired slices ahead of time. But if it’s your first time or it doesn’t fit with your drawing workflow, don’t worry about it. It just makes the next step shorter.
If you can’t draw at all, you should not consider taking screenshots from your favourite anime and assemble it together, since that’s copyright infringement. However, taking and using screenshots of your character in VKatsu is actually acceptable. This is the only permitted option I know of where you can use a character creator for 2D Vtubers.
Update 2023: With the shutdown of VKatsu and the associated companies, the Terms of Service that allowed you to turn screenshots into a Live2D avatar has expired.
Slicing your image
Consider the shadow puppet or paper doll. If you are familiar with Flash animation, the idea is also similar. Cut every moving joint and put it back together.
After obtaining your image, you need to prepare it for the Live2D program first. Take it into an image manipulation program such as GIMP or Photoshop and cut up your image at all the joints that you expect to move, into separate layers.
You shouldn’t just be cutting it, though: To prevent pixel-thin seams from appearing, you should be overlapping the cut or draw extensions to the layer, especally if it’s a part that was behind another.
Additional drawing will be outright necessary for open mouths and eyes, or even the face, if you have a lot of hair covering it. At the very least, you should be considering this in the initial drawing process.
Exporting to a Live2D-compatible PSD file
You don’t need Photoshop to make a PSD file. If you have GIMP, Krita, or something else, you can probably still export to a .psd file.
If you really wanted to, you can have a dozen or two individual image files of each slice and arrange them one-by-one into a Live2D project, but that’s rather tedious. Instead, you can just drag-and-drop an entire layered Photoshop file into the program.
To prepare it for Live2D Cubism to read correctly, delete or merge your groups and leave only top-level layers. If you’d like to update the art, you can drag-and-drop a new PSD file into the open project, and it will replace layers with the same name.
However, you should drag the first PSD file into an empty window with no project. This will create a new project file with premade movement settings with the correct naming scheme. This ensures compatibility with every Live2D Vtuber software.
Rigging it in Live2D Cubism
Live2D takes slices of raster art on various kinds of deformation meshes to animate it. People who are familiar with assembling sprites and Adobe Flash-style vector animation can transfer their skills to Live2D. Those familiar with the principles of 3D animation should understand Live2D easily.
With the movement settings already created, all there is to do now is create a bunch of keyframes on the movement parameters. Since this isn’t full animation on a timeline, however, they’re called keyforms in this context.
The movement parameters can go in two directions and the free version lets you make 3 keyforms per parameter, such as up, middle, and down. You can also link two movement values together, creating something like all eight cardinal directions.
In the free version, you can only have three keyforms on two movement parameters for each image layer, which should be more than enough.
For more complex deformations, you can make a custom 2D mesh – which is like a 3D model mesh, but, well, flat – or you can group it into a simpler square cage, called a Deformer. To avoid animation conflicts (or just get around the two-parameters-per-layer limit) you should also be using these Deformers.
After that, just UV map the layers (another 3D modelling concept) and export to a Live2D model. I could say more, but this abridged guide is already getting a bit long.
Live2D Supported Software
Live2D is licenced middleware, so there aren’t many free options I’m willing to try. The paid ones, however, are all fairly inexpensive.
Personally, I use Live2DViewerEX for my Live2D Vtuber software. This has largely fallen under the radar among Vtubers, as it originally started as an inexpensive Live Wallpaper program.
However, I consider the mouse-tracking feature to be a useful fallback option when the webcam isn’t capturing me, which is a feature I also valued highly in my choice of 3D Vtuber software. There are also a lot of calibration options.
The most common choice is to buy the Live2D DLC with Facerig, but that’s being obsoleted and will no longer be sold.
As for free options, I haven’t tried any of them for various reasons. These include PrprLive and VtubeStudio – PrprLive has a EULA that I cannot currently read, so I’m not willing to try it until I can. As for VtubeStudio, it requires a smartphone linked to your PC, as it uses smartphone face recognition. Both are recommended by other sources, so I’m only listing it for completion. Please don’t ask me for advice there.
More
Since you need to create your own concept art at the beginning, this is a little longer than my quick 3D Vtuber guide, which you can jump into with character creators. If you’d like a comprehensive overview on the many concepts involved in becoming a Vtuber, see my long guide.
Eiri Sanada 