[00:03] lot of people say and after seeing the average price tag of about 2 000 US dollars on a high-end model half of which is from rigging I don't blame them understand why it costs as much as it does so in this video I spent seven days
[00:18] learning how to rig so that hopefully we can learn a thing or two as to why the cost is so high and maybe even Inspire some of you to rig so without further Ado let's get on with it first things first a plan how exactly
[00:31] was I going to approach something as intimidating and complicated as rigging easy the same way I learned any new skill to break it down into bite size and more manageable pieces if you try to take everything on all at once you'll
[00:43] just get overwhelmed and frustrated so with this in mind I split my seven days into seven different sections day one was gonna be dedicated to familiarizing myself for the software day two through six would be working on each body part
[00:55] individually eyes mouths head hair body and then final day day 7 is Polish it'll be a full day dedicated to just tying everything together cleaning it all up and making sure no issues arise I then set myself two rules rule one a day is
[01:13] counted as long as I've spent a minimum of five hours but no more than eight anytime after 8 hours would be counted as a new day this meant that I could knew I didn't have enough time to fit it all in one which gave me the flexibility
[01:26] to continue important things like my day job and streaming while still getting this challenge done The 8 Hour daily Max was to ensure that I didn't run myself endlessly it'll also be more realistic for most people watching rule number two
[01:40] the end result must be a fully usable life 2D model art can be gotten from somewhere else but all rigging must be done by me and then exported to be used in YouTube Studio it's a little bit of a disclaimer before we continue I've used
[01:52] live3d before but only for a very short amount of time roughly two years ago I and even those ones I've forgotten over so much time this pretty much felt like scratch and with that said a game plan in mind and the rules set I dived right
[02:06] in and downloaded live 2D excited and ready to give it everything I had day one the first day was all about getting a feel and an understanding of general concepts of Life 2D such as parameters deformers meshes Etc to give you a quick
[02:20] the meshes are the triangles you see here they allow the image to warp and bend the formers are what you control to warp and Bend these meshes and the parameters are like animation keyframes
[02:33] it's what the software like YouTube Studio references to know what to move and by how much based on what it's tracking like your eyes add the title loans best when I get my hands dirty so instead of learning only
[02:48] soon as possible so I created a very scuffed model with all the basic elements of the head such as the Eyes Nose face ears mouth neck and this single piece of hair as I was making the model I grew an attachment to it so I
[03:02] I don't know why I gave Jim Stoner eyes but I kept it for a short while I watched a few tutorials and after a few hours of work I ended up with this it's safe to say I had a long way to go but it was a decent start day two today
[03:19] was all about the eyes I watched multiple tutorials namely one by Yoshino description along with all the other tutorials that I watched I figured that learning I needed a proper model to practice on so I'm sorry Jim my pal I
[03:35] only just made you but it's time for you to chill on the sidelines for now introducing gems replacement knife incredibly cute model which I stumbled trenches of Twitter it's really well made and has everything I needed so it
[03:50] this as a live 2D learning model on her Kofi if y'all are interested now rigging was applied but everything was cut and ready to go the tutorial by Yoshino art without having to worry about perspective too much I was able to use a
[04:05] pre-made model I bought from watching watching Booboo here and I use that a lot to reference how certain things were made like the head and eye movements for example during my rigging Adventures I discovered clipping layers in the former
[04:17] hierarchies the reflection till which is incredibly useful by the way and most enjoyably physics to give a quick explanation clipping layers allow you to show parts of images depending on what's overlaying them or vice versa like this
[04:30] the former hierarchies managed the order in which things are moved for example I can move the eye on its own like this but if I put it in the face deformer and move the face the eyes would be that too the reflection tool allows you to set a
[04:44] value in one side and then copy it directly to the other side but mirrored this way you don't have to manually do both sides of the head turn so you can just do one side and reflect it to the other it makes things really consistent
[04:56] and also speeds up the process of bunch physics makes things sway jiggle and bounce depending on what moves but the proper model to use and a great life 2D file to reference not only did I enjoy myself more but I felt like I understood
[05:10] things a lot quicker leading to much better results after just a short amount of time and this was how the completed eye rigging looks day three day three was focused on mouth rigging or at least it was until I saw a
[05:24] mouth shape chart and realized how tedious it might all be and so I decided to move my lazy butt to head movement instead for now it was a lot more interesting in my opinion and I felt like I could learn more because of that
[05:36] but big respects to all the advanced math triggers out there especially the V know if you guys know this but I actually got an upgrade to my math movement which is the V Bridger update it looks really cool right big props to
[05:48] let me pop out over here for tolerating my many many feedbacks and give me something that I really like and enjoy these thank you back to the video oh and also Uncle R's too thank you so this day had me learning how to make custom
[06:02] meshes which gave me a lot more control than Auto creating them I watched a lot of tutorials but this one in particular by Kira omori absolutely blew my mind I didn't realize that I could use the deform path tool instead of the warp
[06:15] deformers as long as I set up my meshes like this no longer did I have to spend long in painful hours trying to get smooth and exact curves like I did when I was using warp deformers I could do it like this instead this method was much
[06:27] more streamlined and intuitive another thing that Kira did was this sorcery I also got to see how Kira did her up and down D forms which was really handy under my belt the total time spent on making the head movements decreased
[06:41] substantially and the hairs I followed out of my head were reduced to zero so still have three other things to learn and Tackle mouth hair and booba I mean
[06:53] and Tackle mouth hair and booba I mean um body party oh yeah body body um and this cool line disappearing thing uh-huh day four the fourth day was all about
[07:06] the hair this amazing tutorial by uparuna made hair physics so much easier to do what wasn't so nice to do though was making all the meshes for each hair individually it was a bit tedious since there were so many and I'm pretty sure I
[07:19] did summon efficiently but I did get a lot of mesh practice in it took me a little bit to figure out how to approach the process exactly but I figured going for a layer structure should work starting with bangs then the sides and
[07:31] then finally the back it seemed like everything was going fine until I had to do the sides I got really confused because I didn't know how to push front for them making it look weird I managed to get some health though from
[07:45] rigor friends and they ended up working pretty well and after all that this is what the hair looked like I was learning a lot of things and most fun I had learning to create something since I was creating games
[07:58] back in University but everything changed when the Fire Nation attack um when life decided to take me to a not so great detour till they are I had less time and more unpleasant stuff to deal with but alas like the Avatar emerging
[08:12] from the glacier and returning after 100 years to end the war I needed to pick myself back up and return to rigging so that I can finally finish the final three days of this challenge also sorry I just finished watching avatar The Last
[08:25] script and my God that show is amazing anyway day five due to the mini Hiatus I had to spend some time refreshing my memory but thankfully it didn't take
[08:37] other parts that I had done it was time to go back and finally learn mouth and ear rigging for this day firstly the mouth at first I wanted to pull off this complex math rigging created by cozy but of course Forest as a total beginner
[08:52] there was no way I could pull this off within a decent time frame for the time I had left I needed something simpler to which I stumbled upon this neat little final boost it's a reference file of a math rig I was almost set on using it
[09:07] but I stumbled upon yet another mouth rig reference This Time by Ransom VT it was even simpler and with half as many keys as the previous simple Reagan I best option my goal was to get something working fully and in the least amount of
[09:22] time as possible while also learning as much as I can so all things considered this fit the bill perfectly secondly the ears the ears were a lot harder than I hair out trying to figure out how they work understanding animal ears in
[09:38] perspective was an entirely different Challenge on its own that I'm nowhere near familiar with then I realized I could rig it similarly to how I rigged the eyes does it look topped here no not really
[09:51] but does it work it sure does and considering the amount of time I have left having something that just works for now is good enough for me and look I even got to add a little bit of earph physics too day six we're on the home
[10:04] stretch now and the second last day was all about the booba I mean the body the all about the booba I mean the body the body body the body the booty the butt not the booty the body and physics as always I started off by watching a
[10:18] tutorial on how to rig the body this time it was the tutorial by Yoshino art it seemed pretty straightforward so I took the process of how angle X rigging works and applied that to angle y as well I did this for every part that
[10:32] would be affected by the body the arms head accessories Etc once I was happy with the result I went on to the moment evolved in waiting for okay it's happening jiggle physics in order to First understand how this
[10:47] works I watched the tutorial by cutie dragon as soon as I got the gist I hopped back into life 2D and started jiggling it up at first it was a bit too as I continued to refine the motion more it started to look a bit more natural or
[11:01] you know you can just ramp it up as much as you can it's really up to you I don't have any and now we have the first bit of physics on our model the day was in some partial physics for the hair and Cape before I did day seven It's the
[11:16] final day oh my God we did it all in all progress was pretty good and we've come a really long way but now it was time to wrap it all up with some Polish the goal was simple to tie
[11:31] iron at the Kings clean everything up and most importantly resist the urge to add more things I I know I know you wanna you know this cool thing that you
[11:43] want to add but this is the moment where you really need to get this thing shipped so you gotta you gotta you gotta just you know leave that on the Wayside for now because I couldn't complete the physics on day six I had to make sure
[11:56] sure I did it for day 7 along with Polish Polish usually takes a while because it's all about the little stuff that requires a lot of micro adjustments to really take everything to the next level it's just a lot of little stuff oh
[12:09] I almost forgot I also wanted to do this line disappearing effect for the face too thankfully it was just a simple clipping trick we finally come clipping trick we finally come to the end and before I show you the
[12:23] final result I'll just summarize my entire experience first in just seven days I was able to learn Life 2D and create a fully usable model was it easy absolutely not it's quite challenging and a lot of creative problem solving
[12:37] was needed if you're not used to doing these types of things it might be a bit daunting at first if I didn't have all the resources that I did I don't think I degree in the same amount of time that being said you really don't need to buy
[12:50] anything there's a lot of free practice and reference models out there not to mention the plentiful array of YouTube tutorials you just have to take a look around though I will be putting a link to the playlist I created and used in
[13:02] this video along with any future ones I decided to add in so do take a look it'll be down in the description below so with all that out of the way here is the final result of my seven days of learning life 2D from scratch
[13:15] I hope that this video gave you a little bit more insight as to why vtuber models cost as much as they do you're not only paying for a model but you're paying for craft and the actual time spent making the model as you've seen from the video
[13:28] there is a lot that goes into it from the design art and peace operation to the actual origin itself and all the revisions and iterations in between it's a very specialized skill that takes a lot of dedication to get good at but
[13:40] least try to pick it up if you're interested who knows it might just be don't forget to like the video and subscribe if you enjoyed thanks for subscribe if you enjoyed thanks for watching ciao