In recent years the popular video platform YouTube has seen an increase in faceless creators or users creating videos without showing their real appearance. It is true that the creation of this type of content, without our original face appearing, offers us greater privacy online, very different from the original or traditional youtubers, which are popular and usually known for their appearance.
Known by the name of VTuber , or Virtual YouTuber , we are basically dealing with an online content creator who uses a virtual avatar in order to represent himself . It is an avatar generated through an application and, in general, it is very common for it to have a design inspired by the popular Japanese anime.
Although its name (Virtual YouTuber) may suggest that these users mainly use YouTube as their main platform, the reality is very different: many of the creators do their broadcasts live or post their videos on other platforms, such as Twitch.
The term was first coined in 2016 by Kizuna AI, considered the world’s first VTuber. Although it is true that it was not the first to use a computer generated avatar for the creation of vlogs (the first was Ami Yamato), it could be attributed, almost exclusively, the sudden appearance of the VTubers trend in Japan at the end of that same year.
How to create your own VTuber step by step
The reality is that if you want to create your own VTuber you don’t need to invest a lot of money in expensive resources or equipment. It is enough only to use a program that helps us to achieve it, and a good example is found in Live2D .
Let’s take as an example that we already have a 2D illustration. We can use the different tools that this program provides us to create the illusion that our character exists in 3D space, which offers us the possibility of making changes in facial expressions and limited movements. In short, enough for the VTuber to appear on the screen, with our own voice-over.
But this program is paid, so if, at least for the moment, you want to opt for any other application that is free, another interesting option is VRoid Studio , an alternative that does not require that we have experience in this type of content.
What’s more, it provides a series of basic templates that we can choose to later add instead of starting from scratch. In addition, these types of bases are already manipulated, so we will save a lot of time.
Once we have customized our model, it is necessary to have a webcam that helps us so that the application can track our movements . Although most VTubers use only their face, it is becoming more and more common to perform hand gestures.
