---
title: 'Live2D Full Guide and Tutorial [ Part 1/8 - Setting Up The Essentials ] 【VTuber/Artist】'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=kU7csuuEozA'
video_id: 'kU7csuuEozA'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 0
---

# Live2D Full Guide and Tutorial [ Part 1/8 - Setting Up The Essentials ] 【VTuber/Artist】

> Source: [Live2D Full Guide and Tutorial ( Part 1/8 - Setting Up The Essentials ) 【VTuber/Artist】](https://youtube.com/watch?v=kU7csuuEozA)

## Summary

This tutorial guides viewers through the essential steps of setting up a Live2D Cubism file for rigging a 2D VTuber model from the torso up. The creator, Sapphire, emphasizes that these foundational steps should be performed before starting any new model.

### Key Points

- **Introduction and Prerequisites** [0:00] — The video is the first part of a series on rigging a half-body 2D VTuber model. For those who haven't prepared their art files, there's a linked video on how to organize Photoshop layers.
- **Downloading Live2D Cubism** [0:59] — Go to the Live2D website to download the trial version (42-day trial) or purchase a license. Click 'download' after checking the agreement box, then install the editor.
- **Step 1: Creating a New Model File** [1:41] — In Live2D Cubism, go to File > New Model. Set canvas size to 3000x3065 pixels. Then drag and drop the Photoshop file into Live2D, selecting 'All layers as a new art mesh'.
- **Step 2: Organizing and Assigning Parts** [4:38] — Assign each layer (e.g., eyebrows, bangs, ears) to the corresponding parts folder in Live2D. For example, put eye layers under the 'eyeball' part. Use the sample model (Hiyori) to check assignments.
- **Step 3: Setting Up Draw Order** [9:30] — Adjust the draw order (similar to layers in Photoshop) so elements appear in the correct depth order. Higher draw number = on top. For example, put bangs above hair back.
- **Step 4: Creating Meshes** [11:28] — Create a mesh for every piece using 'Auto' meshing (select all, click auto, standard) for speed, or manually draw triangles. Triangles should be as even as possible. This is like adding bones for 2D movement.
- **Step 5: Generating a Texture Atlas** [14:03] — Select all (Ctrl+A) and go to Edit Texture Atlas (Ctrl+T). Choose a suitable size (e.g., 4096x4096) so all pieces fit at 100% scale without overlapping. Arrange pieces to avoid overlap and click OK.
- **Texture Atlas Settings and Final Checks** [14:48] — Ensure nothing overlaps in the atlas. Adjust piece sizes if needed. Then click OK to generate. The model is now ready for rigging.

### Conclusion

By following these five steps—creating a file, assigning parts, setting draw order, creating meshes, and generating a texture atlas—you set up your Live2D model correctly and are ready to begin rigging in the next tutorial.

## Transcript

hello welcome and everyone this is
sapphire and today we're going to be
learning how to
rig a 2d model in live 2d cubism this is
going to be the first part of a
long series of how to basically rig a
half body from torso about the hip slash
torso up for a 2d
youtuber if you have not done the art
for your vtuber yet or you're still
trying to figure out how to organize the
photoshop layer files go ahead and click
this video i will leave down below
on how to do that or you can click the
card up above this first part is going
to be how to set up your file in live 2d
cubism so it's going to be all the
basics and all the essentials that you
will do
before every single model that you start
on live tv cubism so i would highly
recommend if you don't have one already
get a piece of paper and a pencil and
write down these steps i'm going to have
them up in the
corner for you to see what step we're on
and what we're doing and they'll also be
marked in the chapters down below but
these steps are essential every time
before
you start your model before you start
rigging so that's what we're focusing on
we will not do rigging quite yet in this
section but we are going to set up our
file and then the next video we will
start working on
rigging all right let's go you're gonna
want to go to live 2d cubism i will drop
this link down below this is the website
and you want to download the trial
version
if you have not done this already you
could also buy it
i think i pay about 20 to 30 usd per
month you can buy a full year license if
you already went through your trial but
you should have 42 days worth of trial
if you don't
so you will go ahead and download this
in order to gain access to the downloads
you're going to have to check this box
here and then you can download if you
have mac or windows or whatever
you use so i'm just going to download
windows and the exe should download and
once that's good to go we'll click that
so it will open up we're going to go
next
i agree and go ahead and download it
where you want it to be
you're going to click live 2d cubism
editor and it should launch up
awesome so we are going to talk about
the essential parts
to setting up a live 2d file again you
want to do this before every single
moddy model that you do or if you bring
the file in new you'll have to do it as
well again if you're using photoshop it
should
update if you drag your photoshop file
and it should update all the layers and
everything automatically and keep track
of that as for other programs like
fire alpaca or paint tool sci or
krita i'm not sure if those actually
work with live 2d i've talked to a few
people already about it and as far as i
know i'm not sure which our programs
actually do work with live 2d but i do
know that photoshop works so if you
end up making a model in another program
and
you don't have photoshop see if you have
a friend with photoshop and you can send
them all your layers and have them
organize it and then send you back the
photoshop file to drag into live2d
otherwise you can test to see if your
art program file works i'm not sure and
i will not be able to help you with that
because i do not use those programs i
will be doing this based off of
photoshop so step number one is to
create a file
for the model so we're just gonna go
over to file
new so what i'm gonna do is i will go
back so i can show you
to my photoshop file here and for those
who are wondering
what size to make your photoshop file i
did 3000 pixels by 3065 pixels so i'm
just going to write that out here so you
can see it
be sure that it's pixels so mine's about
this again
it doesn't matter too much but i found
this to be a good size for me
works well and if you want to make a
bigger full body model you could
probably just
start with that and then expand the
canvas down here with your crop tool you
could sort of open that
down and work on the other ends but
that's what i got for this so we're
going to go to file
export or not export sorry save as save
to my computer
and i'm just going to save it as my
photoshop file on my desktop i'm going
to click save
okay so as i was saying earlier you go
to file new model
then you can go down to canvas settings
change this to
3 000 by 3065
i'm going to zoom out here with my
scroll wheel and now we got all of our
folders here
and what i want to do is go to wherever
i saved that
photoshop file and i'm going to click
and drag and not create a new model but
you do untitled model and at all layers
as a new art mesh okay
next i am going to this is it's going to
show
a large folder with everything in your
photoshop file here mine is 2d size
stargating i'm going to drop this down
and i'm going to go ahead and turn off
this background layer
you can use eyeballs over here to turn
on and off layers
and what i'm going to also do is hold
ctrl a to select every single thing so i
can move it together and just move that
down
to the bottom and if you wanted to make
it bigger you can also hold shift to
keep it all the same size while dragging
at the corner so i'm just going to
make it as big as i think i want it all
right and now i'm going to click ctrl
s to save and i'm going to go on my
desktop and actually i'll show you can
also go here save as
desktop and i'm going to do new folder
saya
star guardian 3.0 and i'm going to name
this
the same thing saya star guardian 3.0
okay save
awesome now it should be in there on my
desktop okay so the most
important part that we're going to be
doing next is you're going to be
assigning parts to
everything on your layers on the left
side here so we're going to want to go
through everything from top to bottom
you do this with every single model that
you load into live 2d after you make the
new model like the steps i showed you
earlier
and what we're going to do is go through
everything and give them parts and i'll
show you what that means here
so first we're going to go to our brow
section so i'm going to go to eyebrow
left
and now you want to go to part and see
where it says part
brow we want to this is everything
that's within
my folder you want to make sure you're
assigning it to the folders that are in
live 2d so you're going to want to
scroll probably all the way close to the
bottom for browsing here and i'm going
to select browse to part so now you see
this is in the solo folder over here
eyebrows l so we're going to go through
everything and assign it parts
so same thing for eyebrow r brow i'm
going to scroll down and put it to the
brow folder
in here and you can double check these
by highlighting over them and just
checking to make sure the part is
correct and i'm going to do that with
the rest of everything i'm going to
speed up this section of the video but
if you would like to
see how i'm placing everything you could
go to the bottom of this youtube video
and slow down the playback so you can
see what i'm doing and we will talk
about how to make sure all your layers
are correct after we assign parts so
just focus on
assigning parts to every single layer
first all right let's go
for the loops here i'm going to assign
it to the bangs
you can do full hair sides at once
you can do the whole folder so i'm just
going to select on the folder here
and i am going to go down to hairside
so i don't want anything to mess up so
i'm just going to pull all this
out into the main folder here and make
sure it's all assigned to her side and
then i'm going to delete that by
clicking the delete key on my keyboard
and getting rid of that folder
for ears you're going to bring that into
the ear section whether they're wolf
ears if they're wolfie or semen ears if
you have both you can put all those into
the ear
part another great thing that you can do
to
help yourself figure things out if i'm
not explaining things clear enough to
you is if you go to the live 2d website
you can go to
the download section and go to sample
data and once you get the sample data
you can scroll down and you can download
one of the models they have used
most of them are not english however
there isn't one english version hitori
or hiyori chan you can download
the pro version this should say
underscore en for english
you can show in folder you can right
click you can extract to hattori
and you can open that folder and then
you should be able to go in and click on
that orange file and you can have it
open up in
your live 2d cubism if you want to open
it directly next to it so you have two
tabs to flip back and forth
just open it through directly through
live 2d so as you can see i have hattori
pro and then i opened it here
and now i have two tabs i can flip back
and forth between so if you get confused
on anything for example
there's something that was confusing to
me was i don't understand the eye parts
there is an eye part
there is eyeball and there's a regular
eye so all the stuff should go in the
eyeball
root section it looks like when i'm
looking at the sample model so when we
go back
we know for our eye section that we want
to put all the stuff into the eyeball
part of the folder so i'm going to right
click all those and scroll down and go
to
eyeball
i'm going to go back up to this
head eyes
and grab all my left eyes as well and
bring those into the eyeball as well
here we go again now we're at the chest
i'm not exactly sure to put the chest so
i'm gonna look in here and see
where they put the chest in the sample
one so it looks like the neck is with
the neck
i'm gonna go through here body it looks
like collarbone anything with the chest
is gonna go in the body section as well
so i'm just gonna go back here and i'm
gonna go ahead and move that to
the body
and lastly i'm going to move the hair
back to the
hair back now i'm just going to double
check all my folders up here to make
sure
they're empty it looks like wolf ears
are still in wolf ears so i'm gonna have
to move those down
to ears again i'm just double checking
everything
it looks like all this stuff is good so
what i'm gonna do is go ahead and
collapse that folder and we should be
done with our psd file now as you can
see all of our layers are really messed
up over here we want to get everything
back on the same order and the way we're
going to do that is we're just going to
start going through and moving stuff to
different draw orders so draw order is
like layers in photoshop
the higher the draw order then it will
be more on top and the lower it will be
more below or underneath
so i'm going to go through and i'm just
going to order stuff accordingly the
face on the nose
everything for that looks good i'm going
to move forward for the eyes
i'm going to go ahead and select all
these and i'm going to turn
it up to 5.8 is fine and put it on top
for those who are wondering how i'm
selecting all i just click one and i
hold down shift and i click down
to select more than one now i'm going to
go to my eyebrows i'm going to select
both of those
and i'm just going to pull the draw
order up as well and i'm probably going
to want that a little bit up more
just it doesn't really specifically
matter which draw order as long as it's
in the correct layer that you want for
mouse we're going to select all those as
well we're going to move the draw order
up we might need to go back and adjust
some of those when we're working on
stuff later but we have
the main section good to go i'm going to
go ahead and move this nose
to the nose section as well i forgot to
do that or mess that up earlier which
means i'm also going to want to move the
draw order and the nose up as well
next i'm going to go to the ears i'm
going to select both of those those
going to be
we're going to keep them behind so i'll
just pull that back a little bit
and next we're going to go to our bangs
so we want all of our bangs pretty far
forward so i'm going to select all those
move them up
to about there i want the eyebrows to
stay on top of the bangs her hair side
i'm also going to select all these and
move them up
and for hair back i want that to go
behind so everything
else looks like it's pretty good i think
i just need to grab my golden choker
and move that on top and now we have
everything in the correct drawing order
again we can move stuff over if we need
to if something's not overlapping
correctly remember you can always go
back and change this jaw order at any
time
okay so we finished organizing and
assigning our parts if something's not
working you can go back through and
check and make sure that the part is
assigned to the correct section
and again you can use this extra file
over here of hiyori and look at how
things are organized if something seems
like it's not working
next what we want to do is create meshes
for every single part now there are two
different ways you can do this you can
either do it by hand or you can just
auto mesh everything it depends on your
goals are you in a hurry do you want to
get this done fast and get a quick
version out pronto
or do you want to take your time and
really get everything right the first
time around so there's two options we
have here you can either select one
thing at a time
and like i selected the eyebrow and i
can go auto this is going to create a
mesh
so we want to create a mesh on top of
every single object preset i'm just
going to do standard
and okay there we go so this looks
decent there's some fixes i can make
if you want to edit things individually
there is different guides on how you can
set these
up on the live 2d website you can also
once again
come in here and look at how how hey
yuri is set up so i'm just going to look
at this and
you want to the goal here when you're
assigning meshes
to every single piece of your character
is you want to make sure these triangles
are as even as possible so there are a
few different ways you can do this
so you can auto mesh like i said or you
can do a customized mesh
i would start with an auto so you have a
little bit of a base you can use this
minus pen tool right here to get rid of
things
so i'm just going to get rid of all the
center ones right now
actually i'm going to get rid of all of
it and plus what you want to do is you
just want to sort of surround it as best
you can
i don't know if there's a specifically
right or wrong way to do this but just
do what feels right click around it
experiment again you want to make the
triangles as even as possible so i'm
just guessing right now
so i connected my main sections on the
outside there and then you can go in
with this brush tool
and draw through
so you can do something like that or you
can again have more control over by
using your plus
or minus i have not used the lasso or
the selection tool specifically but that
could be your mesh right there if you
want to make custom ones to really even
out your triangles if you notice the
auto mesh looks a little funky or a
little messy for this one
but again i'm just going to auto mesh
everything for this so again remember
you can go in and do everything
specifically to make it as even as
possible or you can auto mesh everything
i'm going to auto match everything i'm
going to hold ctrl a it's going to
select everything or you can just select
everything like this but control a is
what i'm clicking and then you can go
ahead and click auto for everything and
go to standard
so it'll give everything an auto mesh
again you can see there's a lot of messy
stuff in here you could auto mesh
everything and then go in and fix it too
but make sure you assign meshes this is
what's going to allow
your mesh to be able to move it's sort
of like adding bones if you have ever
done 3d modeling this is 2d's way of
adding bones to your model
so far we have created a model file we
have organized and assigned our parts
over here
we have checked and set up our draw
order to make sure everything is on the
correct layer we have created a mesh now
for every single piece here so that we
can
maneuver and move our pieces for when we
start rigging lastly we're going to
generate a texture
and you can do this by click ctrl a to
select everything again
you can edit texture atlas right here or
you can hit ctrl t
you can do either or i'm going to hit
ctrl t edit texture atlas i'm going to
do
248 by 2048 again this is not a super
important thing and do what's going to
work and you'll see what i mean once we
get in there so i'm going to click ok
and it's going to automatically lay out
everything you want to select everything
and make sure it's at 100 scale here so
it looks like this says it's at 45 scale
i want this at a hundred percent if i do
100
things are not going to fit on there so
i'm going to exit out of this and click
yes i'm going to go back
and regenerate my texture atlas and i'm
going to do something higher i'm going
to go with 8 192. this could
cause maybe possibly more lag or
something so this is when you'd want to
pay attention your resolution
for me specifically i have a pretty good
computer so i don't have to worry about
that so you also want this to be taking
up as much space as you want so i hold
shift so nothing warps and make it
bigger but this as you can see now is at
scale 204 we don't want that so i'm not
going to want to do
the 8 000 either i'm going to go ahead
and click this again and we're going to
try
a 40 96 by 4096 and see what that looks
like so i'm going to highlight
everything let's see what it's at we got
it 95 scale 95 is pretty good i'm not
going to mess with it i could bring it
up to 100 but this is good enough for me
now what you're doing here is you want
to make sure that nothing is overlapping
that's all you're going to do once you
have the automated
set up so go ahead and move stuff around
you're just going to select it and move
it you want to make sure things are not
overlapping so just go ahead and zoom in
look around i'm gonna hold down my
middle mouse to move this around and
maneuver a bit so i'm gonna move these
pieces over a bit
and i'm gonna speed through this again
you just all you're doing here is making
sure
things are not overlapping with each
other so make sure you pay very close
attention to that
and just move things accordingly if you
want you can also scale things a little
bit larger to take up as
much space as possible but if you're new
to this i would just focus on separating
things
so that they are not overlapping
[Music]
[Music]
it looks like everything is good to go
i'm going to then click ok
and just let it do its thing awesome and
now it should all
be ready to start breaking so in the
next video we will
focus on bringing we're probably going
to get the face and the eyes the nose
and the mouth
done for rotating and moving around and
we'll see how far that goes and then we
can take it to the next point after that
awesome so we got a lot of that done
just to go over the essentials and the
setup one more time
make sure your photoshop file is
somewhere around if you're doing half
body 3000 pixels by 3065
one we created a file in model during
this video
two we organized and assigned our parts
three
we checked and set up the draw order to
make sure the layers were
going in the right direction we created
a mesh custom or auto so you can do
custom per
every single piece or you can automate
every single
mesh and five we generated a texture
atlas
with ctrl t and for any extra important
things we made sure cubism was at
version 3.0 in the upper
left hand corner which i actually did
not fix this version because i had been
doing a few different things but make
sure your sdk is at 3.0 you can change
it later it's fine
that should help set up your file to get
ready for rigging we will work on some
rigging in the next tutorials if there's
anything specifically you want to learn
how to rig to feel free to leave a
comment down below letting me know what
you want to see read i hope this video
is helpful
and if you need any one-on-one time you
can set up a appointment with me i
charge 30
usd per half hour for working on a
project together i'll leave that
calendly link down below also if you're
not already on my emailing list
definitely check that out as well i'll
leave that down below for free resources
on how to become a better youtuber
alright i will see you in the next one
thank you so much bye