Tony the Tiger Vtuber Model Showcase (Patreon)

Now that the livestream is over, I can FINALLY talk about this. (If you wanna see the recording of the stream, you can watch it here for the next two weeks: LINK) I have been sitting on this secret for the better half of the past week and it has been absolute torture haha.

I felt really bad not being able to deliver any new artwork this week, though that will change again soon, but this little project has been occupying all of my time lately.

It all started out when I looked at my most recent Tony picture. I had originally planned to make a Tony Vtuber model all the way back in 2022, after Kelloggs did the original twitch livestream. And I felt it would be such a great opportunity to give all the horny furries the kind of Tony stream we all really wanted. All this time I toyed with the idea of maybe working on a Vtuber model, but my efforts were always shot down by the paywall of purchasing a license for the program Live2D Cubism, which was required to make these 2.5D kind of models.

Since I already own Spine, another 2.5D animation program, I felt like paying for another program would just be wasteful. I looked into trying to get Spine to work for a Vtuber model, but only found a custom made rig that one of the users made, with limited support.

So when I was at that fork in the road again roughly a week ago, of either going with Live2D, biting the bullet and paying for it, trying to make it in 3D instead or dropping the idea altogether, I decided to just go for it and try 3D. I used Blender for this, which is free and was able to find a tutorial series that showcased the process of making your own Vtuber model: LINKED HERE. In addition the tutorial series suggested another one on modeling, LINKED HERE, which also came in handy.

3D has been an Everest for me, as I had tried it years ago, actually studied it back when got my Bacherlor's degree, but I had since then always failed to do anything worthwhile. Tools were always clunky to use and there were way too many pitfalls along the way, that I could ever muster the patience to really sink my teeth into the 3D modeling and animating process.

So with this, I set out to really put myself to the test. I kid you not when I say that I did nothing but focus on making this damn model work. My biggest concern was making the face look like Tony. I figured if I failed that, I could scrap the project early. But as that came to fruition and I moved on to texturing, rigging & animating it, I felt myself slip into this mindset of not stopping until it was all 100% done.

And almost a week later, clocking in 50 hours in Blender and spending way too much time in Unity actually getting it to work, I managed to pull this off. I honestly still can't believe I managed to do this. There are still tiny bits and pieces here that need fixing and adjusting, but for now this is probably my most profound advance in skills that I have had in the recent years.

I will definitely get some more use out of this model in one way or another. For streams for one, but I might also actually dabble in animation work and some NSFW stuff would be fun too. There are more tutorials on properly rigging up characters for animation and animating them, so I might come back to this with a few more ideas.

For now though, I will go back to drawing. This has been an incredibly tough road and I am glad I could reach my destination, but now I really wanna go back to just putting stuff on digital paper. Oh and of course continuing work on that Coach Night animation. ;3

So yeah, I hope you found my rambling insightful. If only to explain why I was absent this past week. :P

Enjoy!