You are your avatar and your avatar is you — A Beginner’s Guide to Avatars
From Snow Crash
The couples coming off the monorail can’t afford to have custom avatars made and don’t know how to write their own. They have to buy off-the-shelf avatars. One of the girls has a pretty nice one. Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set™ and put together her own, customised model out of miscellaneous parts.
The other girl is a Brandy. Her date is a Clint. Brandy and Clint are both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white-trash high school girls are going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down to the computer games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy. The user can select 3 breast sizes: improbable, impossible and ludicrous. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her eyelashes are half an inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are rendered as solid ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can almost feel the breeze.
Clint is just the male counterpart of Brandy. He is craggy and handsome and has an extremely limited range of facial expressions.
…It doesn’t pay to have a nice avatar on the Street, where it’s so crowded and all the avatars merge and flow into one another. But The Black Sun is a much classier piece of software. In The Black Sun, avatars are not allowed to collide. Only so many people can be here at once, and they can’t walk through each other. Everything is solid and opaque and realistic. And the clientele has a lot more class — no talking p*nises in here. The avatars look like real people.
A Beginner’s Guide to Avatars
It’s scarily amazing how prescient Snow Crash was in describing the role of avatars in the metaverse back in 1992.
As our daily lives become more deeply intertwined with our digital ones, our avatars become part of our identities. This is particularly so in crypto where many value privacy and prefer to be pseudonymous — for these individuals their avatars are essentially them.
While most avatars we are used to so far tend to be static 2D images (right-click save that JPEG), there is a whole world out there in terms of what is possible. Here’s a quick guide to the 2 main types — Live2D and 3D Avatars.
Live2D Avatars
Sample
Where to use: In Zoom/Google meet calls, streaming on YouTube/Twitch
Anime-styled 2D Avatars are almost synonymous with Vtubers. Your 2D avatar can be brought to life on screen in real time using motion tracking technology.
To transform yourself into a living, breathing 2D avatar, it is important to understand the components involved.
They are
- An avatar
2a. Making the 2D illustration move
b. Motion tracking software
3. You the performer
Starting with
1.The Avatar
The avatar itself is a 2D illustration (the JPEGs we are familiar with). If you want a custom one you will have to commission an artist to draw one for you.
2a. Making the 2D illustration move
After you have the 2D illustration, how does it move?
The avatar needs to be rigged in a software like Live2D for motion.
You can think of avatar rigging like manoeuvring a puppet. You can rig a full body illustration including your legs and feet but most of the focus tends to be on the face and upper body.
Movement includes
- Eyes — blink, look around
- Mouth — open when speaking, close when not
- Head movement
- Torso movement
There are varying levels of complexity to rigging 2D avatars. For example, the mouth motion of a simpler avatar would just be represented as either an open or closed state, while a more elaborate avatar would have lips rigged to animate the different mouth shapes when pronouncing different vowels and consonants (visemes). Additional complexity can be in details such as hair that sways or bounces. If your avatar has a tail then the movement of that could be animated as well.
2b. Motion tracking software
There are many options available for motion tracking. These are VSeeFace, VTubeStudio, Animaze, Prpr Live and Nizima Live. All are free to use, although full functionality is usually unlocked with a subscription. You can either run face tracking directly with your webcam, or through an iPhone with face tracking connected to your computer.
My recommendation: VTubeStudio
VTubeStudio is easy to set up, fully featured, compatible with both PC and Mac and affordable! To use iPhone face tracking, you will need to download the VTubeStudio app on your phone and sync it to your computer. The only downside to VTubeStudio is that it only supports Live2D models and not 3D avatars.
3. You the performer
Vtubing is a performance that shows off the performer’s skill, similar to how puppeteers perform.
The avatar can be rigged to perform a wide range of pre-recorded expressions and gestures such as an exaggerated angry face, pout or wave. While there is motion-tracking software available, mapping to hotkeys allows for a greater range of expressions that are not reliant on the software reading that specific expression.
You as the performer play an important role in how natural and expressive the avatar is. As a performer you will learn the limitations of the different software and also how best to perform. You might need to slow down or exaggerate certain expressions, or use hotkeys to perform pre-recorded expressions as part of the performance.
Pros of 2D models
2D models tend to look better and are more expressive than 3D. The unique hand-drawn quality is hard to replicate in 3D!
Hand Drawn 2D Avatar
VS a 3D Avatar
Cons of 2D models
Turning is limited to a couple of degrees to the left and right. You won’t be able to turn 180 degrees around and show the back of the character. However, if you are planning to use the 2D model for Zoom/Google Meet calls, the range of motion would be more than sufficient. Note that 2D models are not usable on social VR platforms like NeosVR and VRChat.
Pricing
There’s a wide range of prices when you are looking to get a Live2D model depending on how detailed you want it to be. It is also common for the art/design to be done by one artist, and the technical rigging (movement) to be done by a dedicated rigger.
For a quality custom Live 2D model, expect to pay US$500 or more for the artwork and another US$500 or more for the rigging.
3D Avatars
Where to use: In social VR platforms such as NeosVR and VRChat, when streaming on YouTube/Twitch
With a myriad of file formats, engines and terms like shaders, 3D can seem technical and overwhelming. Fortunately, with the growing interest in VR and the metaverse, there has been a push towards interoperability, ie software and platform-agnostic standards. For a more detailed discussion on interoperability, check out Jin’s article on Avatar Interoperability.
3D avatars like their 2D counterparts, can be used and controlled with motion tracking software. VSeeFace and Animaze support 3D avatars for such purposes.
However, social VR platforms are where you can really flaunt your custom avatar.
In social VR platforms like NeosVR and VRChat, the possibilities are endless. You can be a simple floating cube, humanoid characters with full body tracking all the way to Transformers that change from a car to a robot. Importing an avatar into the platform requires some technical implementation.
Note: VRChat requires users to spend a minimum number of hours on the platform before you can upload your custom avatar.
File format: True interoperability is still a dream but a safe bet would be to use the VRM file format. VRM was designed as an open standard to handle humanoid avatars in VR environments. VRoid Studio by Pixiv is a free software that allows you to quickly create your own custom VRM avatars.
3D with full body tracking
You may have seen people dancing at clubs in VR. How do they do this?
Sample
This is achieved via full-body tracking. Trackers are small devices attached to different parts of your body e.g. your elbows, hips and ankles. There’s even a tongue tracker that HTC is releasing soon. (What might one use a tongue tracker for I wonder? I guess you could lick whipped cream in VR.)
How to get a 3D Avatar
Your options are to
- Try to find free avatars online
- DIY using software such as VRoid Studio
- Pay someone to make a customized one for you
There are many free avatars online and also in platforms such as VRChat but these are not customised. You can also find ready-made avatars, accessories and wearables for sale on platforms such as Gumroad, Booth or Vket.
However, if you want a customized avatar then your options are to either DIY, or to pay someone to make and rig it for you.
To find an artist/rigger it’s best to look at sample of their previous work. In VRChat some artists have free models that you can use which you can use as a gauge of the quality of their work.
Many have asked about where they can get a Live2D or 3D avatar commissioned and paid for in crypto — this is something we’ve been trying to compile but with little luck so far. Please do reach out to us if you are currently doing this.
As more Crypto Twitter personalities e.g. BigDSenpai, CL, Jseam experiment with Vtubing we hope to see more people get their avatars in 2022!
