Storybones

Vtuber project

Storybones was my lockdown project; after a year of Twitch streaming, I started feeling at odds with my online presence, and had bigger ambitions of interacting in online spaces using a character, or some degree of anonymity.

With zero acting experience, I instead set off to dedicate all of my free time to a much more ambitious project: designing a Vtuber character that I would want to see on Twitch, who would actually represent my creative ambitions.

I had no motion tracking or 3D modelling experience, and no external backing, so while I even put my regular streams on hiatus to dedicate my time to the project, by the time I got to the debut date I faced too much burnout to livestream to an audience 2-3 times a week. That said, I'm still really proud of all the material I made single-handedly around this campaign. It took around 2 years of development.Storybones was my lockdown project; after a year of Twitch streaming, I started feeling at odds with my online presence, and had bigger ambitions of interacting in online spaces using a character, or some degree of anonymity.

With zero acting experience, I instead set off to dedicate all of my free time to a much more ambitious project: designing a Vtuber character that I would want to see on Twitch, who would actually represent my creative ambitions.

I had no motion tracking or 3D modelling experience, and no external backing, so while I even put my regular streams on hiatus to dedicate my time to the project, by the time I got to the debut date I faced too much burnout to livestream to an audience 2-3 times a week. That said, I'm still really proud of all the material I made single-handedly around this campaign. It took around 2 years of development.

Initial designs

The initial design for this character was more similar to my appearance, but the more I modelled it, the more I realised I wanted to branch out.

The point of designing Vtubers is that you can be anything you want, in whatever shape you want! So instead of making a character similar to me, I redesigned it as a faustian-looking faun named Bones, who would welcome the viewer into a retro-futuristic bar.

The design took a swing at the types of Vtuber characters I saw people engage with, but I also wanted to push the expectations of Vtuber character designs at the time.

Additionally, there was hidden worldbuilding and story. I wanted the audience experience of stumbling across this on the internet to be similar to driving by a petrol station in the middle of nowhere, going into the corner shop, and realising there's a whole different world hidden at the back.

3D modelling and rigging

In the Vtuber community, models were very time consuming and usually commissioned to somebody else other than the performer.

In my case, I had to cut corners in a way that could still be justified creatively, so I decided to make a PS1-style character. At the time, this had an interesting nostalgic appeal, and it kept the model and rig relatively simple.

The idea was that this would allow me to start on a shoestring budget, where the character movements could be purposefully stiff, and then scale up the character in quality as I got better budget and equipment. My top priority was good immersion.

I did a lot of research into these models and on how to imitate the limitations of the technology. The creative direction that I was most drawn to was a 3D model with 2D face textures, which was still really expressive. These faces went through a few passes; earlier versions can be seen below.

The face textures couldn't be motion tracked the same way as the body, so the setup I came up with was to hotkey each expression and to assign them to an Elgato Stream Deck (which I already owned).

This character had was a fairly standard humanoid rig, with a couple of add-ons that I wanted follow-through physics on:

The hair
The coat

So these parts of the design also had extra bones.

Some early "hologram transmission" promo tests. These versions were yet to get a few fixes in weight painting and texturing.

Setups

As the format for the streams, Bones would stream from the bar, bringing out a flatscreen TV to play indie and retro videogames in. He would be running the bar next to a petrol station and an abandoned tip, so I modelled lots of props to be added to the shelves. More props could be added or changed around, based on how the audience interaction developed.

The way I would cheat the movements of the character was to render still images of the background and foreground separately, and then capture the character moving in-between both.

Partway through, I also realised that modelling this many props wasn't the biggest priority to be able to debut the model, so I made an early version of the bar full of cardboard boxes, where it looked like the character was still "moving in".

Another fun setup I found was this piece of software, which would allow me to make more art oriented streams.

I also made was this cute simplified version of the character, in case I didn't have the energy to motion capture my own movements on a particular day, and just wanted to stream with my voice. The movements were rigged with veadotube mini.

Promotional

As part of the worldbuilding, I made a ton of promotional material that I'm still really proud of, including copy and images. I really enjoy making "extended worldbuilding" campaigns to promote a piece of media, and that's what I was striving to make here. The debut was planned as a "reboot" of my Twitch channel, so I would be dropping lots of little clues, showing security camera footage, body scans of the character's vitals as they booted up, etc.

I used a mix of Blender, After Effects, Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, OBS and VSeeFace.

Some of my favourites below: