3DTubers are Cool, Here's How I Became One

hey I'm Jay the dev guy and have you noticed how many good animators are on YouTube these days I mean online animation in general is kind of in a golden age right now there's so many smash hit series like the amazing digital circus or Big Top Burger punch punch forever it seems like the list of wildly successful Indie animations online just gets bigger by the month but what I want to focus on today is 3D tubers which I categorize as YouTubers who use fancy 3D animation but to make more conventional YouTube videos like commentary or devlogs or comedy skits or whatever vtubers are doing well Jokes Aside I'm actually going to ignore vtubers for this video cuz well there's definitely some interesting things going on over there I'm talking about creators who hand animate their avatars to make cool YouTube stuff and I want to talk to you how I spent the last 6 months becoming a better one I hope you like the new look by the way and some of you might see the title and point out that I already was a 3D tuber and that's true I had this handmade Avatar this 3D set and my videos were just me talking about whatever not like a fictional series or something but when I first started this Channel The Animated segments were always you know means to an end it was good enough to get by and they weren't terrible but the focus of my videos was always whatever I was talking about that day rather than the animation itself in fact I always thought spending time improving my animation skills skills seemed like a waste that could be better spent making the games I'm developing but my attitude changed once this channel started to grow and I met a few of these other animators talking to so many insanely talented driven and just crazy creative animators it really rekindled my love for this stuff it seemed like everyone else was just having so much fun and so here's how I spent the last 6 months overhauling my style to become a better 3D tuber so when I first sat down to overhaul Jay the dev guy I wanted to outline what makes the Styles I love work so well you know what did they do that someone at my skill level could follow to overhaul myself into something really beautiful and when it comes to 3D art it's pretty safe to say that for me and for everyone else the biggest inspiration in the last few years is spiderverse there really hasn't been any other thing that's shifted the mindset of 3D artists half as much as these movies their influence has been pretty obvious in animated Blockbusters for a while now but within 3D YouTubers spiderverse is basically the starting point and this makes sense since the kids who grew up watching spiderverse are now old enough to be animators themselves which I can give you a minute to process the fact that the first spiderverse came out six years ago so kids who watched it in Middle School are now in college I you can pause if you need a sec for that listen I love this style as much as anyone else so I was definitely going to be stealing the obvious stuff the choppy frame frame rate the handdrawn 2D elements that make everything feel more handcrafted the Mish mashing of multiple art styles into one frame these things have all been talked about to death which doesn't mean they're not super cool but I'm sure anyone watching this video is pretty familiar with spiderverse analysis at this point so I was going to draw attention to part of the art style that I don't see talked about as much A lot of people will say things like every frame feels like it came right out of a comic book which I see why they say that but it's not really true SP sperse doesn't look like a comic it looks like well it looks like spiderverse these movies aren't trying to look like a comic came to life they're just trying to feel like it did accuracy was never the goal these movies are CGI and they wear that proudly on their sleeves while analog media has beautiful artifacts like film grain or textured paper or CRT scan lines digital media excels at being crisp you know perfectly flat and infinitely adjustable spiderverse excels at all these it takes what it wants from analog media But ultimately plays to the strengths of digital art all this to say that my first guideline was to do exactly that pull inspiration from tradition but lean into the modern look I think some of the best 3D tubers already have followed this principle so before moving on to the next guideline let's just let's just admire this eye candy for a sec I mean content can be so cool when there's actual artists behind it HH my next guideline was that I wanted my style to promotee playfulness my favorite 3D tubers are constantly changing the style just for the fun of it and it may be because most of them are brain rotted Zoomers yes but it doesn't mean I don't absolutely love it in fact speaking of brain rotted Zoomers let's look at penino Prime's content for a sec he'll Bounce from hand painted backgrounds to monochromatic outlines to paper cutouts and it's all just a joy to watch or Savannah XYZ style always revolved around this lovely clation look but her well-designed character just fits right in with a Hades style or a lethal company style or this a front to God when I was first designing Jay the dev guy there was probably no Channel I studied more than Funk every video is a masterful display of animation video editing stylization and this guy will overhaul his entire look for a one-off video about a manga he likes this guy's the crown jewel of 3D tubers and for good reason all these artists have styles and workflows that don't just allow for creativity but actively encourage it so guideline number two again have a style that promoted playfulness and guideline number three was simple I wanted to build off what I already had I didn't want to throw everything I designed for Jay the dev guy out I just wanted to give it a nice facelift I put a lot of thought into my character this desk this angry little commenter guy who represents the worst of the internet I still like all of them I just wanted to bring this channel up to par with the other insane artists I've seen on this platform and now that I had a couple videos under my belt that I wanted to see how good I could make things with everything I've learned since the beginning and so with these three guidelines I set out to overhaul my art style the first thing I wanted to improve was how I drew outlines onto my props and my first video I just painted the outlines directly onto the texture it was simple it looked okay I guess but being painted on had a lot of limitations outlines couldn't always be around the edge of an object I couldn't animate them or dynamically change the color or do anything fun with them at all in my later videos I added a Dynam outline just on top of my hand painted ones which like I don't it was better than nothing but now that I've improved at blender it was long overdue to make my outlines fully Dynamic I did this by using blender's line art modifier which automatically creates outlines around and inside of an object but instead of letting the line art modifier do all the work I purposefully rained it in to only generate lines on the Contours I then went around my model and marked specific edges I wanted it to draw an outline on top of and then if that's still not enough I'll just draw the new shapes around it by hand this was a really nice middle ground that let the computer do most of the work while still letting me add an artist touch when I needed it and since all my outlines were now completely within blunder I could play with it as much as I wanted with with just a couple clicks I could change the color animation or whatever I can think of with these outlines which encouraged the playfulness I wanted if there's one thing I've learned from the art I've made in the last year is that if you want your art to be fun you need to make it as easy as possible to be creative and my outlines being this flexible does exactly that once my outlines became fully Dynamic the textures of my objects just felt stiff by comparison I still wanted some detail to be painted onto the texture but it didn't feel alive like my outlines now did so to fix this I separated the detail into its own layer and then wiggle it around at the same Rhythm of the outlines it gave the feeling of handmade imperfection almost as if I redrew the scene every frame without doing any more work I later expanded on this when I was inspired by an rational mango video that had an animated texture across every single prop in his scene it made every frame feel so alive and so after experimenting with a few different looks I landed on this paintbrush texture that's overlaid onto everything and also moves with the rhythm of everything else I don't think this actually looks like I hand painted each frame of Animation but it's a messy crisp collage of styles that I think is just cool enough to work on its own and I really like it and so then to further encourage playfulness I created all these materials in blender using node groups which basically means that all my objects share the same logic with each other so if I want to make changes like swapping the paintbrush texture or making everything one color or adding entirely new effects I can easily do so since every object references the same group this is a lot like what I talked about in my components video where coding logic in a video game and one reusable place can help Foster creative thinking and I'm really glad my animated segments now follow that principle too after after adding a few fun details like my laptop's RGB lights changing color over time sneaking in some Easter eggs and adding subtle post-processing effects I'm really happy with the results there's still a few things I want to improve especially with my 2D elements like well like me but I can always improve that later cuz while I'm glad I took the time to push myself for this overhaul one of the most important lessons I've learned from this YouTube channel is calling it good enough when it's good enough so I'm happy with this for now I had to learn a lot about blender for this overhaul and it was honestly one of the most rewarding experiences I've had as an artist 3D art is so intimidating because there's so many different parts you have to learn like modeling and texturing and materials and postprocessing and more but now that I've taken the plunge and tried to improve every part of my animation pipeline I got to tell you that blender makes Improvement so intuitive like learning any part of blender makes learning the rest of it easier everything shares the same hot Keys like grabbing an object is the same Button as grabbing a key frame or grabbing a node like for example to do all those paintbrush fanciness on my objects I had to string together a bunch of nodes in my materials which was an intimidating new corner of blender I'd yet to learn and at first it felt like I was learning specialized knowledge that was only helping me solve like texture related problems but later when I wanted to add chromatic aberration to the edges of my screen like similar to what Scott Pilgrim takes off does I could just use the same exact nodes in a different section of blender to make it happen and since blender is so well-designed and it can do so many different things it felt like learning any new aspect didn't add to my skill it multiplied it I firmly believe that animation is as good as it is on YouTube today because tools like blender are well-designed extremely capable and free and blender is just going to keep getting better they're going to update their 2D animation tools soon and well it's a stereotype for 3D tubers to never shut up about blunder so hey I guess I really made it then huh I just in all seriousness I want to encourage anyone who's on the fence about learning blender or learning more about blender to just dive in and do it cuz it's so fun and I really like my art style now I'm having a lot of fun just animating it for this video I had a lot of fun just talking about it with you guys I hope you found it interesting please leave comments on what you think I still read every single comment because I'm crazy but honestly I missed you guys I know I haven't uploaded for a while but I really am taking YouTube super seriously and part of that for me is I just launched a patreon I plan on doing some really fun things with his patreon but for now I want to emphasize some of the cool stuff that's already there for every video I've made I recently recorded a commentary track where I go over my thought process reveal cut content review comments and just have a fun time talking about my work in a way that I think anyone who likes this video would really enjoy and there's a Discord listen I I know all of you know what Discord is but before I launched my patreon I subscribed to a bunch of other YouTubers patreons and their discords and honestly it's actually really fun these dedicated fan communities are so much less toxic and spammy than the public discords I'm used to so I just got to say if you're like me and you've never gotten into patreon or Discord before you should really try it I've been having a great time talking to fans and other artists and it'd be cool to talk to you too patrons can also get their name in the credits but there's also a tier that'll get you a handdrawn profile picture from me in the credits of my next video if you're into that sort of thing I'll only draw stuff that's within reason obviously but it's worth noting that I do officially consider Sonic OC's within reason so see you there thank you so much for watching I know most of you are here for developer updates on the games I'm working on and I promise those are still coming you know subscribe to see them don't miss them but I get so busy with my full-time job and other projects I haven't even told you about yet so you watching me and especially supporting me on patreon would really mean a lot to me this is only my fourth animated video and it's insane how much my audience has grown in that short time I really really want to make this channel a legit thing and your support and kind words and patronage it means more to me than I could possibly describe this is the most fun thing I've ever done I hope you're excited to see what's next see you next time [Music]

Channel: JayTheDevGuy

Views: 31,379

Keywords: jaythedevguy, 3DTubers, FUNKe, SavannahXYZ, Doodley, PinoPrime, 3DGang, Animation, Blender, BlendTuber, 3D Animation

Id: AQIgdefkXac

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Sun May 26 2024