Final Task Part II: My own Vtuber

For the practical part of the project, as I stated in the previous post I'd take on the challenge of creating my own Vtuber, with an unique look and interests. I took note that quite many of the popular Vtubers were demi-human and had some sort of a theme going on with their look. That certainly makes them more memorable. The English speaking Vtubers I mentioned in my research post, all have a theme. There's a shark-girl, Gawr Gura who's a descendant of the Lost City of Atlantis, the Grim Reaper's first apprentice Mori Calliope, a detective called Watson Amelia, a lovecraftian-themed Ninomae Ina'nis with huge tentacles and a phoenix called Takanashi Kiara who loves fried chicken.

After giving it some thought what theme and demi-human aspect I'd go with, I set on making her a pilot and making her part lynx. So, time to look for some inspiration and reference images! Already at the beginning I was very certain that I'd want her to have more of an old school pilot vibe with those sweet looking goggles on her head, and an image search with "pilot 1940" did just the trick. 

The second pilot is not necessarily a very authentic one, but had a similar jacket I wanted, so...

Launchpad McQuack was a character that suddenly popped into my head when I figured out the pilot theme. Not sure where it came from, but it worked as a great starting point, although I did completely forget about him until I got to writing this report... After figuring out the theme and references, it was fairly smooth sailing with creating the character, at least visually. 

Some rough sketches

In the debuts I watched, quite many Vtubers had this sort of a basic information sheet, including their name, age, height, likes and dislikes, favourite colour and food, what's their icon they use on their platforms, their hashtags, all that kind of stuff. So in order to build a bit more of a personality for her, I did a small sheet with some of her interests. 

May introduce, my very own Vtuber: Aliya Ilves 

Part lynx, full time pilot and an adventurer. She is a huge fan of Indiana Jones and loves to throw out quotes from the movies. Her favourite games are the Uncharted and Tomb Raider series. During her adventures she often somehow manages to damage her plane, but it doesn't really bother her because she is a self-proclaimed "world's biggest gearhead" and loves fixing it up. She has a massive pin collection which just keeps growing by the day. 

The next part was to make a supposed clip of her stream. This proved to be probably the hardest part of the task, especially the content. What would I show in it to somehow try to capture at least some of the essence of vtubing? Coming up with some sort of a "script" for a supposed stream wasn't exactly an easy one to do. Although every streamer, be it a Vtuber or a regular one, they have at least a plan what they're gonna do during the stream. Then the actual content comes a lot from also just going with the flow of what's happening in the chat, while playing or whatever it is that's being done. 

Honestly, initially my idea was to go even a bit further with this, as in it would be voice acted and at least somewhat more properly animated, but due to my time and energy running low, I had to cut down some of my plans but I'm still fairly happy how it turned out. 

Final words

What a ride it was. Would've I had more time (started just a bit earlier...) it would've been quite nice to try and do an actual Live2D model of the character and control it with FaceRig, but without any previous experience for that it would've been a bit too big of a workload to handle. 

This was super challenging, but in the end also a whole lot of fun!