---
title: 'How I Created a 3D VTuber Avatar Without Paying a Dime'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=cp65Nw4l7lk'
video_id: 'cp65Nw4l7lk'
date: 2026-07-28
duration_sec: 938
---

# How I Created a 3D VTuber Avatar Without Paying a Dime

> Source: [How I Created a 3D VTuber Avatar Without Paying a Dime](https://youtube.com/watch?v=cp65Nw4l7lk)

## Summary

This video demonstrates how to create a fully animated 3D VTuber avatar for free using Vroid Studio, VC Face, and Warudo, and integrate it into OBS for live streaming. The presenter shows the entire process from character creation to motion tracking and OBS setup.

### Key Points

- **Character Creation with Vroid Studio** [0:55] — Use free software Vroid Studio to create a 3D avatar. Customize face, body, and clothing. Export as VRM file.
- **Customizing Textures and Adding Logos** [3:07] — Edit textures in Vroid Studio, export layers as PNG, modify in free editor Photopea, and reimport to add logos or custom designs.
- **Face Tracking with VC Face** [7:46] — Use free VC Face software for face tracking. Load VRM avatar, start tracking. Works well for facial expressions but lacks hand tracking.
- **Full Body Tracking with Warudo** [9:27] — Warudo (free on Steam) provides face and hand tracking. Configure motion capture, calibrate face and hands, and customize settings.
- **Integrating into OBS** [13:25] — Add game capture source in OBS, select the Warudo or VC Face window, enable transparency, and position the avatar.
- **Comparing VC Face and Warudo** [14:10] — VC Face offers more expressive facial tracking; Warudo includes hand tracking but may be less expressive. Both are free.

### Conclusion

You can create a free 3D VTuber avatar using Vroid Studio and track it with VC Face or Warudo, then integrate into OBS. Both tracking options are free, with VC Face offering better facial expressions and Warudo adding hand tracking.

## Transcript

Hello my YouTube friends!
Believe it or not this fully animated 3D
Vtuber cost me exactly $0 to make and the
best part you can build one just like
this and have it running in
OBS in less than 15 minutes.
I'm going to show you the completely free
software stack for creating, tracking and
how to bridge all of this into OBS for
your next live stream.
We're going from blank canvas to
broadcast ready so you
know what, let's get to it!
I don't want to be repetitive today so
everything I'm going to show you is
completely free and there is a link to
each piece in the description down below
so you can download it and follow along.
That is the best way to learn.
Let's get right into character creation.
So to set up our model we're going to go
ahead and use Vroid Studio.
It's totally free, you can see it's for
Windows, Mac and you can download it on
Steam or of course the App Store.
We're going to go with Windows and it
just puts it in there so now we need to
just go to our download folder.
Once it's downloaded we're going to go
ahead and just double click on it and you
don't need to put this in any special
place just click next and we're going to
create a desktop shortcut by clicking
next and it's just going to install.
And it's that easy we can just click
Launch Vroid Studio and finish.
Boom!
There it is.
So we're going to click Get Started and
agree to the terms and since I'm going to
show you what to do we're just going to
go ahead and click Skip.
Alright so this is
Vroid Studio right here.
For whatever reason the sample models
isn't working, doesn't really matter.
We're going to go
ahead and create a new one.
We want a masculine one.
Really they pretty
much both look the same.
You can use your scroll
wheel to zoom in and out.
You can use your right
mouse button to spin it around.
See it at all the angles.
If you press your scroll wheel you can
move this guy around like this.
All of this is pretty much
exactly what you would expect.
If you've ever done character creation
for any kind of video game
this is like that on steroids.
You literally have access to every bit
and piece of your character.
On the face you can move every piece.
Your ears, your nose, your mouth.
You can change all of those things up but
it goes a lot farther because you can
adjust the whole body, the torso and
every aspect of the clothing.
And I could certainly go through every
bit and piece but since I'm sure that
you've already done character creation in
a game just imagine character creation
where you have access to every bit and
piece on that character.
There is one thing that I want to show
you though because while you can modify
these characters in any way you see fit
it doesn't make any sense for me to tell
you that but not show
you how you can do it.
Obviously that's not
the look I'm going for.
I'd rather have him look like he's
wearing blue jeans or something.
So what we can do is go to custom up here
and we can adjust them.
I already did the adjustment on these but
I'll go ahead and show you how I did it.
I'm just going to go to edit texture
right here and it'll come up here with
some colors, base colors and otherwise
and I'm going to move him over here so we
can see how the colors work and we'll go
to the base color and I'm just going to
go with some blue jeans, go with darker
ones like that and we can have our accent
color here and we want it to be blue but
it can be dark like that.
That'll work.
So we can click out of here and we can
save the item or close without saving.
It'll still save the
colors that we have right here.
Now our shirt doesn't actually look black
which we want it to be black so we're
going to do the same thing.
We're going to edit our texture and we're
going to come in here and
we're going to go black.
There we go.
So what if we wanted
to add a big logo here?
Well you would think you'd be able to
just click it here and input your logo
but it doesn't really work like that.
And what we would do is right click on
here and export and it's just going to
export this layer PNG right here.
So we're just going to save that and then
we're just going to go
into an editing software.
In this case I use Photopita.
It's totally free.
I'll leave a link in the description.
We can just drag our layer on there.
Super easy.
And then download whatever logo you want,
drag it on and all we have to do is put
it where we want it or shrink it up.
Now needless to say there would be a
little bit of warping or something like
that because these are 3D assets.
So one of the things that you could do if
you wanted to is take this logo and maybe
give it a little bit of a shift and then
stretch it like this a little bit.
It'll look a little weird here but it
will look better on your character.
And then we're going to click the check
mark and we're going to go with file and
export PNG and we can just
call this whatever we want.
And then what we can do is go back into
here and all we have to do is go to our
layers here and click on the image and
just go to our downloads where that just
went and click on it
and click open and boom.
There it is.
And then all you have to do is remove
your base color and you can see that it
shows up and looks pretty good.
Now you can go in here and tweak this up
in your photopea so it's exactly how you
want it or whatever but for the purposes
of this that looks pretty good.
We can click on here and save our tops so
it's going to save it as an item.
So we can come in here anytime if we
wanted to dress them up in a different
way and boom it's
going to still be there.
The last thing we have we've
got to do is our socks here.
Those look like socks that we would use.
And right here we want to go with shoes
and I'm going to go with a pair of
sneakers of some sort.
These kind of look like Jordans.
I like it.
That will work just fine.
So now we've got our character all
created and we can go into
accessories and add them.
There aren't really any in here.
We can also look at our character and
adjust or outline the width.
All that sort of stuff.
Add rim light shading, eye alignment,
change up the bones,
whatever you want to do.
So you can get
accessories and all that stuff.
I'm going to show you how
you can do that as well.
But pretty much once you're done you're
just going to want to
save your character.
So we're going to come up here and click
export as VRM and we can reduce polygons
and all that sort of stuff.
But there's no real need to do any of
that if you have a
reasonably decent graphics card.
So what we're going to do is export.
It's going to bring this up.
Now the program we're going to use is
going to be a VRM 0 and all we have to do
is put the name of
our character in there.
We'll call this one Mike
and the creator is also Mike.
And basically that's about all the
information that we have to put in here.
And we can put redistribution prohibited
at whatever blah blah blah and export.
It processes this up and we just get to
decide where we want it to go.
So that looks good.
We'll save it right there.
And now we're exported and
ready to get this thing working.
Now you could spend hours or even days
creating your character.
Every aspect can be modified and you can
open each asset and paint your own bits
and pieces if you're
artistically inclined.
That works exactly the
same as the logo on the shirt.
Every asset from the face to the shoes
can be downloaded and modified.
So to use these models with OBS we're
going to go ahead and use
a program called VC's face.
It's totally free.
All you have to do is
click here to download it.
Boom it downloads.
Go to our download page and what we're
going to do is right click and unzip it.
And there is really no install here.
You just run it right from here.
So what we're going to do is right click
and copy this and then we're going to
take it and put it somewhere.
We'll be able to find it later.
So we'll just stick it over here.
I'm going to right click and paste it.
And we'll double click in here and we are
going to right click on the faces here
and we're going to copy as path.
Then what we're going to do is go to our
desktop right click and
we're going to go to new.
Shortcut and we're going to paste that
path and click next and finish and boom.
Now we have a shortcut on our desktop.
We can just double click on
that and we're ready to go.
All right.
So here it is.
VC face loading an avatar is super easy.
We already created one.
So we're just going to add it.
Click opened and then we can set our
camera camera settings all this stuff.
You can just click recommended settings.
It'll scan your system and put the best
settings possible right here.
You can select our dude.
We actually see him down here.
Just click start and you can
see it works really really good.
When I blink it blinks.
When my mouth moves it moves.
It really does a nice job but you will
see that my hands don't really work and
that's really kind of the only bummer.
Now there are free plugins that allow you
to add hand tracking to CV face but I
found them to be pretty
bad and add a lot of latency.
So I found another solution for face
tracking with hand tracking built in.
Let me show you.
So to control our little guy we're going
to use this program called Warudo and we
could just go over here and click
download and you can see that the
unfortunate aspect of this is you have to
download it on steam.
It's really easy to get a steam account
and all that sort of stuff.
So I'm just going to go ahead and open
steam and we're going to search for it
and it's totally free.
So we're just going to add it to our
library and then we can just go over into
our library here and
find it and install it.
So once it's
installed we can just run it.
Only thing annoying about this is that it
has to run the steam
client while it's running.
So next we want to click on basic setup
and so we're going to go ahead and select
our character folder.
In this case I have a character saved so
this will be the folder.
So what I'm going to do is cut our
character and we're going to open the
character folder here and I'm just going
to paste it in there.
And close all that stuff out.
Then I'm going to drop this down and we
can select Mike and click OK.
And we're going to go ahead and let it
help us configure our motion capture.
So do we want to track full body?
Probably not.
Upper body.
Yes.
We don't have Leap Motion controllers.
We don't have an iPhone or iPad that
supports face ID because not everybody's
going to have one but we
do have a working webcam.
That's our working webcam.
We're going to click OK
and then face tracking.
There's a whole bunch of
different ones that you can use.
We're going to go ahead and start with a
media pipe and we can customize our face
tracking right here with different info.
We know our blend was already VMR zero.
So and body movements.
Yes.
Auto blinking.
Yes.
Eye movements.
Yes.
Head movements.
Yes.
And all this stuff is pretty good.
Lip Sync.
We're going to go ahead and click yes.
We're going to select our microphone and
we're going to go ahead and
click yes on there and click OK.
And we can customize our post tracking so
we can use the keyboard the
trackpad all this sort of stuff.
Mere tracking fingers
only and all that's fine.
We're going to leave that and click OK.
Yes.
We want to import the expressions of
course and click OK.
And it tells you what your expressions
are and how to access
them with the shortcut keys.
So take a picture of this or whatever.
Write it down somewhere
so you know what they are.
We're going to click OK and we want to
use a transparent
background and we're done.
So here we go.
There are all kinds of settings that you
can change and move and do so that you
could literally set
this up any way you want.
You can change your environment.
You can change the directional light.
This will affect how your character looks
and all that kind of stuff.
It's really pretty amazing.
Then we've got our character right here
and we can go through and mess around
with different media pipe settings and
everything else on how this is handled.
And we can change the shortcuts for our
emotions if we want.
So all of this stuff is in here.
We can save animation profiles.
The amount of customization that this
program has is absolutely unbelievable.
It's really really awesome.
And then of course the media pipe.
This is the motion tracker.
We can go down here and what we want to
do is go ahead and
calibrate the face tracking.
And then what we want to do is we could
change the global sensitivity and all
that stuff on here if we like.
Our eye blinking
sensitivity and all that stuff.
And then hand tracking.
We want to calibrate our hand tracking.
So put your hands up and
then go ahead and calibrate it.
And there we go.
So now when we go down here you can see.
Now I don't know what this stuff is.
So this gives you your frames per second.
How fast it's tracking you.
All that sort of stuff.
And there we go.
Turn the pendulum physics off.
If you want that stuff off you can see
over here it shows you your
hand tracking when it's on.
But we really need to kind of move
ourselves or zoom ourselves out.
So we can just go in the window.
Zoom ourselves in and out.
Basically move it around just like you
did on the other piece.
Rotate it around.
So there we go.
And of course we've got all of our hand
movements and everything else.
Now all we have to do
is get this into OBS.
Go ahead and click the plus.
And this time we're going
to do a video game capture.
You can have as many of
these in there as you want.
We'll just call this VTube.
Click OK.
And we're going to go ahead
and capture a specific window.
We're going to drop this down
and select the right window.
Right.
There we go.
And then we're going
to allow transparency.
And that's it.
Now all we have to do is
place this wherever we want.
And there you go.
We're all set.
Now I don't think this one is quite as
expressive as the other one.
Let me show you what I mean.
If we go into our game capture again.
Let me go to VTube.
Let's just call this one VC.
And what we're going to do is capture a
specific window once again.
And allow the transparency.
Click OK.
And there we go.
So now we have two of them
running at the same time.
So you can see the
difference in expression.
Now I get it.
This stuff is on here.
It's really easy to get rid of these.
All you have to do is
hold down the alt key.
And you can drag these off.
And there we go.
So I don't know.
What do you think?
Obviously it is really nice
to be able to use your hands.
But we've got VC on the left.
And we've got Warudo on the right.
Which allows you to
use your hands and stuff.
But I still think VC is much more
expressionate and all that sort of stuff.
And of course I have to use two different
webcams in order to make this work.
Because the same webcam can't share both
without a lot of latency.
But it just seems to me like there is a
lot more expressive
activities going on with VC.
So it's up to you.
And they're both free.
So try them out.
Now let me know what you think about the
two trackers in the comments below.
And do you want to
see more about VTubing?
There are a lot of different
things that we can explore.
From where to find assets, to creating
and modifying the stock assets.
And even advanced
movements and character setups.
Let me know about it
down in the comments.
And if you want something even simpler
you should check out
this video on PNG tubing.
It's all totally free there as well.
And if you're always looking for tools,
tips and tricks to help make you a better
live streamer or YouTuber,
subscribe to the channel.
My name is Michael Fire Jr.
Thank you so much for watching.
Have a great day.
And I'll see you in the next one.