Tony VTuber Outfits (Patreon)

Tony has now dynamically changable outfits, you can see them in the video below, or linked here along with other short videos: LINK

I tinkered with the Tony Vtuber model a bit more! I'm getting more and more comfortable with using Blender and it is starting to seem like a slippery slope to where I am considering maybe dipping my toes into 3D animation.

However, I am keeping my feet firmly planted to the ground for now (two foot analogies, nice) as in that I won't try to do too many things too fast. I want to keep up with my artwork and 2.5D animation and not abandon either of it. This past week I have worked on the animation, a new comic page as well as commissions & YCHs. So don't worry about me striving too far into a different direction.

However, this has been one thing that I wanted to figure out: How to make a vtuber model that allows me to dynamically change between outfits or toggle different parts of the model on and off. The solution for it was kind of tricky and not really elegant, but it works: To define facial expressions the 3D model uses so called shape keys or blend shapes. Basically you define an expression, for example "smile" and then pose the face to make the character smile.

Then you go into the Unity engine and tell it "This is what smiling looks like". The option for blend shapes usually are used for that, but they have other functions too: You can change textures to alter the colors and potentially make a character blush. However one thing that also includes is the opacity of a texture. So you can decide to disable or enable the surface of an object by making it visible or invisible. That worked all good and well for the clothes, but the real issue was to also hide some of the underlying body, so it would not clip through.

For that I made a Tony texture that consists of four different versions with each of them having different alpha channels. When an outfit is enabled, the texture moves to a different position so the right part of the body is hidden. It's not visible to the viewer, but this little trick allowed me to not make items clip through the body so much.

So yeah, this was a fun exercise and I really enjoyed working on it. :3

Let me know what you think of me going into the 3D direction! Are you excited or are you worried I might draw less because of it?