Live2d Tutorial for Ren'py

live 2DS the animation software used to bring many of your favorite YouTubers to life but it's also one of the industry standard tools used to animate characters in visual novels and it's free asterisk for most of you in this tutorial I'll show you how to use live 2D for your own run Pie games if you stick around to the end I'll show you some ways to use live 2D you might not have thought of now I understand a lot of you watching this video are like yeah I know all this I've already put my character in life 2D and I need to figure out just this one little thing we'll hold your horses because I think it's worth taking the time to look at this whole workflow holistically in this video I'll be teaching you all this stuff it's a it's a lot live 2D uses skeletal animation not frame by frame in traditional animation you'll animate stuff image by image really labor intensive but with skeletal animation you take an image split up to a bunch of parts called meshes and attach them to an Armature skeleton a series of interconnected bones that fit together to form a posable figure and some warp deformers which we can use to give a faux 3D appearance to static images this all gets animated with a series of parameters that are set off with individual keyframes and the program interpolates how it moves it means a little more time to set up and plan the character versus frame by frame animation but once it's done you get tons of different animations done quickly more importantly when you export these animations they need to be exported frame by frame which means a 12 frame per second animation exports 12 full images for that one second long animation it really bloats the size of your game but with skeletal animations in live 2D that's same animation will be exported in a few smaller files you'll get a texture sheet which has all the parts of the animated figure on a single image file a few smaller files that show how that texture file needs to be put together and then in live 2D each one of those animations gets their own text file very small and this is important to keep in mind because you can have as many animations as you want each additional animation just adds a text file's worth of extra information instead of again all this stuff frame by frame on the renpai side of things do this right now open your launcher go into preferences install libraries and press install live 2D cubism SDK for Native there done to get live 2D go to live2d.com and press the download the free trial version and before we download let's look at these comparative features between the free and licensed version of live 2D right now most of these stats will look like gobbledygook but the long and short of it is for most rempi applications the free version of live TV is more than enough to do what you need it to do especially that top part did you see that you can use live 2D for commercial purposes as long as your small scale visual novel Enterprise makes less than 10 million yen per year which is about 75 000 in USD that is that everyone here yeah yeah Yeah so basically live 2D is free you have 42 days to play around with the pro features for free but the trial version never expires so it's worth just downloading this and having it as a tool whenever you might need it that being said I bought the pro for Indie license and for me someone who uses it a few times a year it's not a bad price every year you have an annual plan the cost for the software license gets cheaper every year until it's down to 10 680 Yen per year which at the time of recording is about 80 a year and if you're a student or faculty member it's even cheaper but it's also worth keeping an eye out for any live 2D sales I'll try to make sure the description has a link whether you buy the license or not consent to the software license agreement and privacy policy select first download put in your email and download the latest release version for your operating system double click on the download file install it open it you know the drill all right you're all set let's make a character it's possible to take a single static image and still do some really interesting stuff but if you want characters to have a full range of motions and expressions you'll want to design your characters to have many different parts to make sure they're easy to animate plan for how elaborate you want those characters to be for instance let's look at a static image of a character's head in three-quarter View and just plop that into live 2D and let's look at what we do if we wanted to make it turn left or right in this case we'd want to turn this image into a mesh by putting little pins in the face to divide it into small triangles I'll explain how to do this later on but for right now we're just talking design when they turn left we want to make the left parts of their face smaller while making the right side of their faces longer that's because the left part of the face is moving away from us foreshortening it while the right side is moving towards us it looks good for the most part but let's have them turn right we're here we can see a few issues start to crop up a few things that make less sense not just my bad design which granted isn't great but we're having elongated pixels it's harder to get certain geometries to kind of match up so by default we're missing some of one side of the face so it limits how much they can turn in One Direction and certain elements of the face don't look quite right when turned worse yet if we want to make the pupils move also well now this is gonna get pretty messy and granular so let's think about what separating different elements of the body could get us if we're designing specifically for live 2D now first if you're using the free version of live 2D you're limited to 50 total meshes which refers to the separate images for each file project but that's actually a pretty good number of meshes let's start with the face if you're intending the character to animate a lot designing it front facing to start is going to be much easier than starting with them looking slightly to one side or the other it's it's going to save you a lot of headache separately layered pupils let us move the eyes around and we separate out the whites of the eyes that can give us some decent blinking animations I'll cover those in more detail later lots of people like to have upper eyelashes to define the top of the eye so let's have a set of those as well then having the eyebrows separated can be helpful and then I like to have front and back hair elements to help with faux rotation over this Central head image and then a mouth that we can open and close oh let's add a nose while we're at it so just with the head that's 12 different animation meshes but that's because we want to have a lot of different Expressions then if we go basic with the body we could have a central body form two arms made out of three segments each and let's say we have a second set of hands you'd want to swap out that's another nine meshes for a total of 22 meshes that still leaves us another 28 matches if you're using the free version of live 2D with my license copy I like to go even more granular than that here's a model that I built for this tutorial that has a lot of separated elements by the way you can use any image software you want to design the characters but I highly recommend using something that export psds which honestly most image software does nowadays I'm arranging each of the different parts into its own folder and each one has its own colored layer I find this easier because the parts are pre-split and it forces you to think about designing stuff behind each of the layers in front like most of this big hair is going to be covered up but when she turns her head and moves her body you might see parts of the hair you wouldn't see in this composition so I made sure it's all filled in there once I have all these separated Parts made I like to save it as a separate file for export and then I'll compress each of these folders down to the independent layers I'll go into it later but having a separate export file is pretty important in my workflow and has some advantages if you need to make quick changes once all the separated meshes are in their own layers I'll delete any symmetrical meshes images that are just mirrored versions of images on the other side we can duplicate those meshes right in live 2D so this saves us some space under texture sheet you can see here she only has one eye and some of the mouth layers are kind of separated there save and then we can move on to live 2D so let's open up live 2D and that's a lot of just empty gray there drag and drop your PSD into the working area here and Bam that all gets filled up pretty quick importing a PSD maintains the layer order and placement of the images which is a huge Time Saver otherwise we have to drag and drop images one at a time individually place them which sucks there's all these menu options you have to go through I do not want to do that ever looking at the working file you can see the individual Parts listed in the parts tab next to these numbers and listed again in the deformer tab click on an individual image from either section and you can see some of the specific information related to that part in the inspector tab here you have the name ID part to former clipping ID draw order opacity and some other settings we'll get into later but for now all you need to know is that the name can be whatever you want but the ID name should be unique for each part so if you duplicate a part like if we wanted two eyes the name will be the same between the two but the ID will be different to explore around this working area properly a mouse is all you need to move around the screen hold down the middle Mouse button and drag your mouse around to zoom in and out use your scroll wheel use your left Mouse button to press and select on stuff and I have honestly never used the right Mouse button quick menu I just don't worry about it by the way this figure has a lot of pieces so if you want to see behind a part of the figure you can use the eye icons in the part or deformer tabs to hide some of the pieces in the front like here I'll just remove the hair there but if you want to look at a piece in isolation at the top of the working area there's a solo button and you can press that to see the image temporarily placed at the top of the draw order you can rename the ID if you want but it's not really important for our needs so I let it just stay as is usually for the two hands on this figure I want to swap between them so for right now let's grab one and I'm going to select the opacity and change it from 100 to zero percent in the working Section press on one of the images and you'll see it surrounded by a red box with a smaller gray box inside that gray box is the image's mesh and as you can see right now it's divided into two triangles the white points in this mesh are called the vertices the line that connect between the vertices are called edges and the triangles inside the edges are called faces click and drag on a vertex and move it around and you can see it's changing the length of each of the attached edges which changes the shape of the related faces the trick to making really smooth looking figures though is to properly divide each of these meshes into ways that correlate with the illustration inside at the top here you can see a variety of live 2D tools but right now I want to look at the two mesh tools we have available versus the auto mesh generator which evenly divides the images and vertices select an art mesh and press the tool and you'll see a menu pop-up select one of the drop down presets and you'll see an array of vertices being placed across the figure it's mostly good in the settings you can adjust the vertices spacing which really just determines how many vertices there are in total the boundary margins determine how closely the edge of the mesh crops to the image super important if you want to retain your line art and then the next two options determine vertices density around the boundaries then Alpha value determined as transparent is something you really shouldn't be worrying about if you exit out you'll notice this actively has been changing your mesh but don't worry if you didn't do it right open the generator again and you can still change the settings now that mesh is pretty good but it's exactly right if you want to finally find manual mesh edit tool up here to select a Vertex you can use the selection tool right there if you want to grab more than one vertex hold shift while you press another one or you can use the lasso tool to grab a bunch of them so I'll use the select tools to move the vertices around in a way that makes sense to me and then whenever we're done we'll press the green check mark when you're done and happy with it when I'm trying to make an ideal mesh I want the vertices to be placed in a way that lines up with the art and can easily morph the images for different angles like I want vertices to be placed along areas where there's a change from like to Shadow or at points where I want it to bend you don't want too many points on a mesh both because it's hard for me to physically work with it and also every point we add to the model will need the device to use more processing power to render your figure for most run Pike games this probably won't ever be a problem we'll usually have a few figures on screen at a time in front of a static background but for other games where they might have hundreds of game objects out there at any given time they want to have their models designed as lean as possible in some cases I want to be way more specific with how the vertices are placed like with this jacket so let's go right into manual mesh edit and I'll use stroke mesh mapping to draw over the line art like Auto mesh it has some settings that I can use to adjust it in this case I want a wider mesh width for the thicker lines and a thinner mesh width for the thinner lines so drop those outlines and use the select tool to fix any parts of the image that are lying outside of your mesh or any points that don't quite line up and let's fill in some of those middle areas use the add Point tool to place extra vertices in the body of the jacket I want to follow the folds in the sleeve here and a few points in the middle of the jacket and then let's do some simplifying for instance we want to retain the edges on the top of the jacket but we're not going to be bending the top of her jacket up or down very much so you can either use the delete Point Edge tool or the Eraser tool to remove those and then if you need to connect some loose vertices on the inside press the auto connect button here that's a pretty good looking mesh and later on you might find that you need to add more points to a particular model for some reason if you do you can go back into manual mesh mode and press four division to quadruple the paces or if you need to be more selective without the mesh has more points you can use the second add points tool to automatically place a connected Point inside of the mesh now in some cases you might want to divide a mesh into multiple different meshes let's say I want to divide this belt into two pieces for instance in that case I'll duplicate the mesh with Ctrl C Ctrl V you can see the two belts there now select one of the two belt meshes go into manual mesh edit and remove points from outside the area I want to remove now you can see that mesh is made of just that one part of the image then I'll go into the other mesh press manual mesh edit and remove the opposite side there we go now I want to make sure that the belt sections overlap for later so outside of the mesh edits I'll select the image after I add a couple more points here and then again outside of that mesh edit I'll stretch out these vertices so there's plenty of overlap between these two images of course you don't need to apply meshes to all your images but you'll know exactly how well your meshes are working when we get to rigging the skeleton each of these images are in this file but they're not really connected to each other they're just loose images to connect them together we'll use rotation deforms and warp deforms warp deformers are the live 2D Powerhouse this is the tool that you use to twist and reform any meshes underneath it we call this relationship a parent and child a child is going to inherit all the attributes applied to the parent so make sure there are enough points on your mesh for a warp deformer to bend it the way you want it to to use it select an image and press the create warp to form a button on the top here you'll get a dialog box with a few options but we won't worry about these for now we just want to make sure this is set as a parent of the selected object and click create at the bottom here now you can see this green and gray grid applied over the image below with the red box around it the red box is the selector for the entire warp deformer but I'm not concerned with that I just care about the green dots inside so I'll press this temporary work button on the side here and just manipulate the objects as much as I want without making it permanent you can see that the Warped overmer is moving the mesh below it what's happening is that each of these vertices in the green grid exudes an area of influence over the points on the mesh below it basically the Big Green vertices move the dots the mesh below it while the gray dots can move them to a lesser degree let's check yes on this temporary deform tool and go over some of the other possibilities the warp deformer you can also select a bunch of meshes and put them under the same warp deformer so you can manipulate them together you can even Nest a warp deformer under another warp deformer so you can deform while you deform each of the warp deformers will only affect the warp deformer directly underneath it so if we have this High Fidelity mesh over a mesh that's only divided into quarters manipulating the parent mesh no matter how many division points there are in it will only affect the warp within the constraints of the smaller warp so when you're nesting warps you generally want to make sure the warps with more divisions are the children of warps with fewer divisions if you need to add more images to a single warp deformer after you've already made it go into the deformer tab here drag and drop all the images out make your warped former bigger and then add the images back in to make your warp deformer mesh more detailed let's highlight a warp deformer and check the inspector the important parts here are the number of conversion divisions and the bezier division number the number of conversion division adds more great points in here dividing the mesh into more parts so each one controls a smaller pool of points below you can move these individual gray points but I generally avoid it until I get to the Polish stage of this figure the bezier division number is the number of green points and manipulators in the mesh these are the controllers we use to manipulate a bunch of these gray points at once the more bezier divisions the more control you'll have over the image itself and just a quick note you want the warp deformer spoon capsulele everything it's going to manipulate underneath it otherwise you can get some kind of weird interactions if at any point you want to hide the warp deformers including the gray boxes over the figure you can press the hide warp deformers button here in the working area near where the solo button is now there's a lot of nuance to warp deformers but let's discuss the other major deformer rotation deformers are used for rotation that's it they're they're my favorite I like to use rotation deformers as a way to structure my rigs I'll look at my figure and see where I'd want to have some rotational elements on this figure I don't want the legs to move a lot so I want three rotation deformers on this arm do on this one since I want the hand to stay there one two then I'd have another rotation former for the Torso what up and another one for the head wow looking at this big list of meshes in my finished version of this project you can see this is a great way to sort the individual objects into groups that make it easier to manipulate later to apply rotation deformer you can select an object and press the create rotation to former at the top here like we did for the warp deformer but personally I like to use the rotation to form a creation tool you click and hold to angle and size out the deformer and when we make a second one it automatically becomes a child to the previous deformer you made so here I'll quickly create an Armature by making the Torso in the head then click back on the Torso make these three points on the arm click back on the Torso and then two more points on that are now we can go back to the former list and I'll drag and drop the different parts to the correct part of the Armature one important note though is that when you put a warp deformer over a rotation deformer it's not going to be able to manipulate the individual mesh points that the rotational deform encapsulates so I really only use the rotation to form for these big pieces and not for individual small elements that I want to be manipulated by warp deformers like the iris so now that we've gone over to formers let's tackle the most important part of this whole process parameters parameters are setting that we use to control one or several meshes or deformers all at once for instance on this completed version of my model the parameter hair front sway X manipulates the three front sections of hair moving them from left to right on a more extreme level the headaches and head y parameters manipulate a ton of meshes all at once to give the illusion of 3D Movement we want these because it translates a lot of very specific animation movements it is something we can more easily animate instead of animating all these individual Parts every time we have an animation where the character turns their head we can just set a parameter that twists the head and creates the effect automatically for us for vtubers these are all very important because it reduces the total amount of information their camera needs to relate the software in order to animate it and for us these are important because it makes our job a lot easier later one really nice part of using Live CD for animation versus motion capture is that we can be kind of quick and dirty with these param settings this arm does not look great at every angle when you turn it but we don't have to worry about it at every angle just the angles that I'm going to animate it at for V tuber rigs they need to look good no matter what combination of parameters are being used which requires a lot of finesse work that's why a lot of YouTuber models tend to be a bit stiff and not have a wide range of motion it saves a lot of time with rigging for us though if there's a combination of parameters that just doesn't look good will just try to avoid it by default there are a bunch of parameters already here delete them we're going to make better ones from scratch if you want to reuse your figure for a vtuber and for an in-game model I'd recommend just making a second live 2D model entirely different formats have different needs and what animates well in game won't necessarily translate to a good vtuber model so let's fill out this empty parameter press the new parameter button on the bottom here we can set the name of the parameter we'll call this one smile and the ID which I always leave is the default followed by the ranges if you have a motion you want to start from a default position that can move to two extremes I'll keep the minimum negative 30 the maximum 30 and the default at zero for a smile I like to go from the default of expression lists and go from smile to frown so I'll keep it as is if you have a motion that's defined by two extremes I'll usually set the minimum to zero and leave the top at 30. for instance when I set the parameters for the mouth opening and closing I'll start at zero for a closed mouth and then at 30 that's as wide as the mouth will go once the parameter is created select a part you want associated with parameter in this case mouth and then set the key forms key forms are the points on the parameters where you set where you want to measure deformer to be manipulated and then live 2D will interpolate all the in-between changes it takes to move the character from one position to the next under the parameters tab you'll see a few buttons here that let you rapidly select the key forms if you want your default range to start in the middle select the three key form button and if you have a parameter with just two extremes select the double key form button that gives you a good place to start now when the Red Dot that you could move here on the parameter is hovered over a key form for a selected mesh or deformer you can manipulate the object in that key form in the working area when you go back to the parameter tab to move the Red Dot to another key form you'll see live 2D is now moving that object how it's set in that key form set the two extreme positions and now you can see you have a full range of motion these key forms are placed for that specific part you manipulated so if you want another parameter to control multiple meshes or deformers at once simply select another part set the key forms the same as you did before and adjust stuff just like before now you can see the multiple objects being moved together let's say you want the objects to have different key forms than the one two or three here maybe when the mouth frowns you want the lip to go up just a little bit more but just towards the ends there for that you can add additional key forms you can either use the edit key forms manually button which lets you move around the key forms and add or subtract them on this timeline or I like to quickly scrub through the parameter to show this pop-up on the side with three buttons add a key form delete a key form and then this little drop down don't worry about that right now when the pop-up is on screen I'll press the number box on the ends there and I'll manually type in a nice round number near where I need it on the timeline this makes it so if I need to manipulate another part in conjunction with this I won't struggle to find the right point on the parameter I can just type in that number so add a key form and now at the very end I can move the lips however I want a little bit of a different kind of move there and there we go it animates like normal until we get to this keyframe and then it shifts to the next one if you accidentally selected the wrong part or you're just not happy with it you can press the delete all key forms button to clear all the keyframes of the selected part away you might have noticed this parameter only allows one dimensional movement across an axis from left to right but what about the eye where you'll look left to right but also up and down for that we'll link parameters we can set parameters for the i in the x-axis and the parameters on the y-axis when we press the link button on the left it's going to take the rightmost key form from the parameter below it and move it to the bottom of this three-dimensional grid and move the leftmost key form to the top while the first parameter stays where it is now this whole grid is considered one parameter we really need this for objects that move along two axes because if one part is used in multiple parameters the new parameter being adjusted will override the setting of the part the previous parameter if we unlink the eyes you'll notice that when I move one it moves kind of weirdly in conjunction with the second parameter so generally as a rule of thumb each mesh or deformer should be associated with only one parameter each this means that sometimes if you want a part to be manipulated in two different ways you'll create a warp deformer for each manipulation for instance I like to have the irises change in size in addition to having them move around the eyeball so I'll manipulate the iris individually to have it move around the eye but I'll also create a warp deformer specifically to change its size if you're anything like me you'll accidentally forget this and you'll use a part in multiple parameters or accidentally keyform something and just forget about it for a quick sanity check press this parameter button here that shows only the parameters active for selected objects if you see one part with multiple parameters fix it that's the parameter Basics but there's a lot more Nuance let's break this character apart into segments so I can show some Advanced methodologies for making amazing live 2D characters [Music] we've already gone over how we can link parameters to create movement along two axes but you might have noticed that we can't quite get up to the upper corner there in fact if we move the parameter all over you'll see that we can really only move in this diamond formation let us move into the corners select the object you want to adjust in this case I Iris and then in the parameters tab press the little three line segment here and press synthesize Corners this will bring up this pop-up don't worry about these values just say okay and you'll see the parameter can now get into these corners now that we have that adjusted you may have noticed the iris is moving outside of the whites the eyes to adjust that we'll make the whites of the eye a clipping mask select the iris and then the inspector tab you'll see under the deformer setting there's a clipping ID that's the object that will determine is The Edge limits for the iris just go into the drop down here and select the eye white and now the Iris will stay within the whites of the eye there getting clipped off whenever it goes outside of the bounds of that object we can change the size of the clipping mask to make our character blink we'll make a parameter called IL blink and the default position isn't quite as open as I'd like to be so let's give it a negative 30 to 30 range at negative 30 will shrink the eye weight down to be practically empty I'll select the image then use the lasso tool and drag it around the vertices I want to move down and I'll use the select tool also located at the top to manipulate them I'll just move the rest of these points by hand that looks mostly good but towards the end it kind of you know gets a little chunky there so we'll go ahead and add an extra key form at negative 29 and we'll make the opacity zero percent and negative 30. and there we go then I'll move along the parameters of the key form at 30 and I'll make the eye a little bit bigger this time using the brush selection tool which lets me paint the vertices I want to select and then I'll move the vertices up again using the select tool just to get the last little bits there by the way if you don't select the image before you use the lasso tools you can end up selecting all the vertices from every mesh even the hidden ones which you might not want to do so make sure you select the image first to finish up the eye I'll make the eyelash move along with the eye and adjust the eyelash shape at each one of these key forms so it gets that kind of 3D furl out look that it has there that'll cover the white of the iron at the bottom there when it starts to disappear and it's a really good looking blink for the mouth let's set it up the same way as we did for the eye we want an open and closed State this time though I want to move the lips open first and for this I like to use the deform brush tool select the lip you want to manipulate and then press the deform brush tool located at the top adjust the size of the brush so the tool details Tab and you can adjust the brush weight and stiffness the way it determines how powerful the brush will be 100 basically lets you move the vertices as much as you want fifty percent will only follow your brush halfway while zero percent won't move the vertices at all this stiffness determines how that weight is distributed from the center point which you'll see as a second Circle there the inside Circle will have the maximum weight applied to it while the farther away from that inside Circle The closer the selected vertices will have zero percent weight applied to that so at 100 stiffness everything in the brush will have maximum weight applied well at zero percent it will be gradient from maximum weight to zero back to the finished model underneath the lips I placed a mouthpiece which is just a circle of flat color that I'm scaling down and up to fit the different lip sizes then I added a set of teeth with the mouth as the clipping ID when the mouth opens I'll increase the size of the mouth and while I was at it I made the bottom of the face expand a little bit so you can see the jaw open up while the mouth opens pretty good then I created a second parameter for the teeth that will make them open and close between the two of them that gives me a pretty full range of motions for the mouth for different mouth Expressions I created a warp deformer that encapsulates just the lips in the mouth which you may remember I made earlier we want them to smile we'll take the sides of the warp curve them up open the mouth and then I made a teeth adjustment thing just to make sure the center of the teeth always kind of matches where we'd want to go and for a frown you'd want to turn that down change the center of the mouth a little bit a little bit maybe open the teeth up a little bit and there we go now combine the expressions with the mouth opening and closing teeth adjusted for different places and that gives us a pretty wide range of Expressions let's say we wanted something extra like let's say we wanted to be able to curl the lips to one side or another and use that in combination with the smile frown and mouth opening parameters we'd make a new parameter lip curl but how would we set it up with the mesh and deformers would we a make a new warp deformer to curl the mouth B reuse the mouth deformer and Link the new parameter with mouth open or C reuse the smile deformer and Link the new parameter with smile frown the answer is any one of them they're all valid the trick is finding out what works best for your character and what makes the most sense to you for me I found it easier to mix it with the mouth open parameter because now when I curl the mouth I can also have the jaw move up and down and left and right is the mouth changes positions which I think is pretty cool okay so this is sort of my favorite move with live TV because when you get it just right it's one of the most impressive looking things you can do with any animation software there are a lot of ways to do this but what I like to do is make a few different meshes for these different parts of the head a warp deformer for the right eye and eyebrow a warp deformer for the left eye and eyebrow a warp deformer for the mouth a warped former for the face and then as many warp deformers as I need for the hair in front of the face and the hair in the sides and the hair in the back of the face then the left and right ears and the nose can be left as meshes since I don't really use them for anything other than in this parameter so for the head warp let's think about how these different parts will move together for the hair it's easy enough so let's look at my own head turning let's start by having a simple grid over my face that shows a line over the middle of my face the start of my ears and then the distance from the start of the ear to the end of the ear when I turn my head to the side you can see that the distances between the middle of my face and the ears have changed on the side of my face closest to you the width of my ears is increased but so is the distance between the start of my ears and my face on the other side the distance between the middle of my face and the edge of my face has disappeared and then the ear is not visible at all so when we manipulate the parts of the face to turn from side to side we'll want to set up the meshes to replicate that so when we set up this parameter we'll want to expand the face out on one side and shrink the other and then do that again for the other side but the eyes will replicate that motion but I also want the eyes to maintain a bit of roundness as they turn so when they turn we'll do the same sort of deal to them make the edge of the eye away from a shrink down and expand out the side facing towards us this is why I like to keep these parts separate from the face it gives us a bit more freedom to manipulate those individual elements then the same with the mouth I like to emphasize some of the dimensionality of the lips so when it turns I'll make this center point of the mesh facing away from us come in a little bit and I'll do some other little tweaks to try to keep the lips looking full as they turn with the nose we'll expand out the mesh on one side as it turns to show more of the side of it and then the opposite for the other side then for the ears we'll have them shrink down as they turn and because they're behind the head we'll just have it disappear behind the head as it turns then for the segments of hair as the head turns we'll have the front hair move more in front of the face and the back here move more behind the head going back to my head that's because when you move to the side you see more of what's behind my ears so moving the hair back fills out the head for the little parts of hair on the side I want the hair to disappear behind the head as it turns left to right and for that we'll finally have to deal with draw order draw order is a way we can dynamically change the layer order of images for this we'll finally go back to the parts tab because that 500 that sucks to every part that's the draw order for that part of hair we want to figure out exactly when we want it to go behind the head which for this model is conveniently at the 15 Mark for this chunk of hair and negative 15 on the other chunk hair I've reverted the right chunk of hairs draw order back to 500 at all keyframes so you can kind of see the issue it's still creating the 3D effects but we want it to disappear behind the body so to fix that we'll keep the hair at 500 draw order and then I've added a keyframe at 15 because right at this point is where I'd like the hair to disappear behind the head so I still want it at 500 at the 15 mark But at 30 I'm going to go up into the inspector Change the draw order to 499 and now you can see it disappears behind the head at just the right point now that we have side to side movement good let's add vertical movement for this let's go back to my head again we'll draw a line at the top of where my skull is and then another one at the bottom of my chin a line across my lips another at the bottom of my nose and then my eyebrows and eyes when I tilt my head down you'll notice a lot of these lines on my face are shrinking and getting closer together when I tilt my head up you'll notice the same thing except now my chin is up so my whole head here is just getting smaller we'll want to do that same thing with the character model I find the Y parameter a lot easier to make than the X one it's pretty straightforward when it's tilted up or down I like to give it a bit of an angle up and down since facing downward the middle part of the face will be lower than on the sides when face downward I'll make sure more of the top of the nose shows and that the lower lip shows more than the upper one when faced upward I'll show more of the bottom of the nose and more of the upper lip than the lower lip now when you link these two positions together and rotate the head around there will inevitably be some weird errors that pop up if you want though you can select the part that isn't working the way you want to and adjust the key form on this two axis parameter specifically the ones the corners if you unlink it it shouldn't affect the base parameters but when you re-link them the changes will still be there this part can honestly take a while and you might need to take time to revise stuff for instance I found the teeth on the character would get messed up at weird angles but instead of trying to fix it for every head angle I just added another parameter they changed the middle line of the teeth it's a bit of a workaround but it's you know something that works for me the benefit of us animating this versus Real Time camera capture is that we don't need every inch of the parameter to look good at every possible angle because if there's some combination of parameters that just doesn't look good we just won't do that the Real Time Saver hands are considered hard to draw but they're even more of a pain in the butt to animate Soul cheat instead of animating the hand going into different poses we'll just make hands that are already in those poses and animate them from there and swap between the two different hands for this we'll use Parts go back to the parts Tab and press the little folder button to make a part name it press OK and then you can drag and drop in the meshes you want associated with that part right now we're only worried about swapping between these two hand meshes so we have two parts we want to make and one in hand two with the free version of live 2D you have up to 30 parts you can make so go nuts with it you can also put multiple meshes inside of a part but I'll go over that later the parts functionality will be more helpful when we animate so for now let's just turn off the visibility on the part we're not using and it makes sure we don't accidentally select the other hand we have over this mesh block the hidden one as well using the circle next to the eye for each of the hands I want to make their own warp deformers so let's double check the mesh on the hand plenty of vertices so must be good we'll make a parameter finger wag add three key forms and now let's just adjust that warped former so it bends at each of the extremes and that's that looks a little bit rubbery I'll be honest doesn't Bend like a hand with bones it just sort of flops over this might be a situation where we want to manually create the mesh ourselves in this case we want to make sure to minimize the vertices between the joints of the finger so now when we use the warp deformer hey that spending like a real hand there that's because these straight lines in the mesh aren't being bent by the warp deformer so it's rigid where we want it to be rigid now we'll do the same for the other hand so I'll change visibility on these make it a manual mesh add key form to that same parameter finger wag adjust the warp deformer and there we go that's looking good too if we turn on visibility on the other hand you can see the parameter finger wag is controlling both of them so we can add as many hands as we want and we really only need to worry about that one parameter so for the hair let's break it apart like everything else we've already used warp deformers on the hair to connect it to the head so that means we can use the meshes themselves to define the hair movement along the X and Y axes the front hair can move around at each key form of the parameter with a combination of the deform brush tool and some selection tools but this is this is kind of a pain look at this is a mess so instead I'll use the deform path tool located at the top here while you have the mesh selected press the tool button and you can add little manipulation points along a path I make from one end of hair to the other each one of these Green Dots manipulates a range of vertices around it and then smoothly splits the vertices between each of them so now instead of moving individual vertices I can switch to the select tool to move the dots which manipulates the vertices for me that looks so I'll create a parameter with movement along the x-axis swing the hair from side to side and then movement along the y-axis which in this case is just a little bounce I'm going to pull the hair down make it thinner and then bring it upwards and make it a bit thicker link the parameters together and that's some nice movement now I'll make something similar for the back here since when we rotate the head we want the front hair and the back here to move in different directions and yeah there we go that's really as far as I generally go with hair life 2D does support physics but while That's essential for Real Time camera capture stuff for v-tubers it's just kind of a pain in the butt for animators when you finish an animation you can bake in the physics reaction but it adds a bunch of keyframes and doesn't really look all that great it's tough to adjust and honestly as long as you're smart with how you set up your parameters it's just quicker to do it by hand that being said I'll do a quick little overview under the modeling menu at the top go down to the open physics scene blending settings for every part of the model that we would animate as a set we'll make a new group in this case we plan on the front and back here animating as their own sets so next to group we'll press add which brings up a dialog box we'll name it front hair and we'll pick some presets in this case a head input and for the front here we'll go hair triple pendulum and press ok now we need inputs and outputs for the physics under the input settings We'll add each thing that will move the hair add X and Y head rotate and body twist for each of these we need to designate if it's changing the angle or position of the hair head X and Y are positions and head rotate and body twister rotations so we'll change each of their types under Effectiveness percent we want to show how much these inputs will affect the physics objects we can have a maximum of 100 for position rotational types each so we'll make the effectiveness 50 for each of these under normalization of input this is reducing the maximum changes of the angle and position down to these values I would want the hair to react to a bigger rotation positional change in these so I'm going to turn these way up now under output we'll add the hair front parameters and now when we move the head around you can see the front hair moving a bit in response if we wanted to increase the reaction of the hair we can go under output and increase the number under pendulum that makes it react to all three of the pendulums down here we can add more pendulums by pressing add under the pendulum settings and then change these values for each of the pendulums here for duration the bigger the number is the longer the duration of the Swing will be and you can see that's represented by making the distance between the pendulums the bigger the number on shaking influence the more the pendulum is going to move laterally we usually don't want this bigger than one Reaction Time determines how strongly each of them will react to movement the smaller the number the more it's going to move and the number compounds on each additional pendulum and finally overall acceleration is just how long it takes to stop change all those things and it doesn't necessarily correlate with the hair it takes time to get the adjustments just right you want to model and group The Hair just right and split it around the right number of parameters to get it perfect or you know we can just properly animate it later we'll we'll just animate it now I just showed you a bunch of possibilities for how you can set your character up that's not necessarily how you have to do it I set up my skeleton with tons of different pieces split into a series of rotational deforms you could also make a big warp deformer for the whole body set that up with the X and Y parameters and now you're just rotating the head around and letting the body follow suit you can make it even simpler if you have a character that's only being used for a few lines of dialogue you can just animate the meshes along one parameter and when you animate it you're just sliding that one parameter from one side to another super quick and with enough effort looks fine highly recommend checking out some of the live 2D showcases for inspiration and if you see a feature that looks cool think about how you can replicate it in your model but now that I have a finished model with all parameters let's get it prepped for animation by setting up the texture sheet way too excited about the texture sheet of the video I mentioned this is one of the reasons I love live 2D we're about to make a ton of different animations but each one of these is just going to be the size of a text file and the bulk of the live 2D export size is just gonna be one little cheetah images this texture sheet is made up of all the meshes we have in our file but laid out in this one image which minimizes the total size again if you're using the live version of live 2D the largest you can make this sheet is 2048 by 2048 pixels but if you break your figure apart right that's gonna be good enough for like 4K display to set up your texture sheet press Ctrl t which should open the new texture Atlas setting we'll name the texture file let's say Punk girl then set it for a width and height of 2048 by 2048 and then we'll press ok now in the edit texture Atlas we can look at the images we have if you press on an image on this texture sheet you can see at the top it shows you its total size and then the percentage it's scaled from the original image in this case all the images are being scaled to 47.12 percent of their original size now I made these assets kind of big the whole height of the figure in the PSD file was 2 800 pixels which is plenty big but let's say we wanted some close-ups in that case we'll want to make sure we up the scale on assets the user is going to see in frame in this case we want the front hair pieces jewelry hands and everything on the face upscaled the areas in blue are where the meshes are being grabbed so as long as the blue meshes don't overlap we can scale up and move the images wherever we want the dress is mostly black so we can probably get away with scaling that down a little bit if we needed some more room so for now let's set it at 65 and we'll keep that in mind for the rest of the assets we need at full size we'll select all of them then on the bar up top we'll change this 100. now we'll take the time to reposition the elements on the texture sheet there we got it all we'll press enter to save the texture sheet and now we can go to this little drop down underneath all these menus up here and we'll go for model to animation let's talk about an animation for a second we have over a hundred years of history with animation with tons of guides and methodologies that have led us from these crude moving figures to the mind-blowing animation of today over the course this one hour video I'm not gonna suddenly make you an amazing animator but what I can do is show you some simple steps to make strong animations for visual novels and step one is expressive poses so animator so in the animator we'll go into the scene Tab and press the new scene button right here first one in the row this pop-up will come up and for renpai will be using the unity SDK but hey if you want to switch to Unity we're already set press OK and you'll notice the working area has a new scene we have a timeline along the bottom and we have an inspector for the scene first we'll press on the scene and in the inspector we'll match the size height and width to match the default size of a renpai game so in this case we'll go 9 20. by 1080. then we want to go into the project Tab and drag over our live 2D file it's going to load the image there full size scale it down to about where you'd want it to be in the scene you can put it roughly where it would be if the working screen is the same size as the game screen but you could also just put in the center that's fine too we'll name that scene default by going in the inspector here and then we'll copy the selected scene to make a new scene using that copy selected scene button here and we'll just call whatever we want that first scene to just have the character in the same spot we want them at with no keyframes marked I like time and just make a bunch of poses that I think would work great for the character you might not use all of them but they give you some great bass lines to work from and can generate ideas for how you'll want to make some poses later on with our new scene we'll go into the timeline tab press this drop down bring down live TV parameters and those are all the parameters we've made for now just move a bunch of them around you can also make any adjustments to Parts by pressing the live 2D Parts visibility drop down here and then we just want hand visible so we set hand two to zero as well if you keep the red playhead this thing uh where it's at the parameters will auto key on the timeline once you get a pose that you think is cool go back to the default pose copy it and make another pose or you can copy this pose and make some variations of that generally though I like to make a core set of emotions for a character happy sad angry disgusted surprised and Afraid and then some variations on intensity for each one of these Expressions that the character might hit during the course of a story maybe an expression that's a little angry and another one that's very angry if you have certain lines in the visual novel that need specific poses you can make those as well renpai has support for layering expression files on top of motion files but that's going to be a whole different video because we're going to be handling that system a lot differently than how vtubers do once you have some posts that you like we can start animating quickest ways to make great animations in live 2D we're going to start with one of our expressive poses which will then make small adjustments to make a short animated Loop then we'll create a secondary action to emphasize that main action usually just a little flourish in there and then we'll add follow through and overlapping action to give it all a bit of Polish so first pick out one of your poses and on the timeline first thing we're going to set up the bounds of this animation the orange bar at the top is the work area of the animation while the blackened area is the total duration of the animation shorten this down to something that makes sense for this pose the purple bar designates how long the image will stay on the screen for the animation which for our current purposes will be the same length as the entire animation the end of the purple bar should go into the darkened portion in the green bar section press on the keyframe there which should highlight the whole column press Ctrl C to copy it and then Ctrl V at the end of the animation to paste it then move the playhead the red thing here to the middle the animation and any of the parts we've already keyframed will just make small almost random adjustments to them setting up some new keyframes in the middle of the animation this just takes the bass pose and gives a bit of movement and dimensionality to it press the play button on the top left to watch a preview of the animation that looks pretty good is the animation plays it's sliding between the parameter settings with a smooth movement which you can see represented with a line if you switch to the graph editor press one of the parameters that was keyframed and press the graph editor button in the graph editor you'll see the keyframes here as dots with lines representing how fast it's swapping from one value to another if you want to change this speed you can change between different bezier curves the first option here makes the curve linear which means the parameter will evenly and steadily change between the two values the second option here is the smooth curve which will hold on the value for a short time before slowly moving into second value with the end part of the curve going faster and faster the next two options are step curves which means the parameter is going to change instantaneously to the next value at the next keyframe or the current one and finally is the bezier curve option that has a number of options you change from by default or you can manually pull the yellow lines to change the curve yourself we're not going to use a lot of this now but just know it's important for later then we'll evaluate the character movement and think of a secondary animation that will enforce the emotion we're expressing here try to avoid adding keyframes at the start and at the end and avoid the Midway grouping of keyframes this makes it easier for us to find the secondary animation and move it around if we need to so in this I want to make the character give a little like kissy kind of face thing at one point during the animation to set down extra keyframes I'm just going to press down control and press on an empty space to make a keyframe appear there or if I want to remove them I'll press Ctrl and anywhere where there is a keyframe I can go ahead and press the keyframe again when this little minus sign shows to remove them likewise I can hold and drag to highlight keyframes and move them around or I can straight up highlight anything and press delete to delete those keyframes the secondary animation should be something contained within the loop though sometimes you might want to extend the animation length out you can either pull out the duration and time the animation and then pull chunks of these keyframes out to go ahead and extend the animation or you can control C Ctrl V and paste the keyframes so you have two Loops of the same animation once we have a secondary animation we like we're gonna add follow through an overlapping animations just other little animations that would happen at the same time like having the hair swishes the head moves or animating the facial expression to match the movement for the hair it'll often overshoot the action objects in motion tend to stay in motion so in the character changes the direction of their movement their hair will still animate in the direction they were going in before and we'll take a few frames to change the New Direction you can do this easily by just animating the hair along with the bass animation dragging holding and moving the keyframes over by a few frames and sometimes if this results in some change you'll want to duplicate the keys at the end of the animation and move them to the beginning just to make sure it Loops properly at this stage you'll also want to change the curves I generally like to hold on to an action for a bit before quickly going to another pose so I'll pick some movements on the character and change up the curves here we go we got an animation it honestly takes me a few minutes to get a new animation done so I generally make a bunch with only a few animations getting a bit more complicated okay but what if you want cut scenes in your game where characters need to be animated with voice clips to start I'll show just how to create a lip sync and we can blend them with our emotion animations but later on I'll show you how to make custom animations with these voice clips first we'll import our audio clips live2d accepts dot wav files so you can just drag and drop that right into the animation here's a clip I grabbed of Joan Jett how do you handle yourself hit punch I whip out my little military tear gas can and paralyzer and squirting I never used that yet had no cause to but you've got one just in case oh yeah yeah I've got one we're gonna go back into the modeler and we're gonna set values for lip sync in the parameters tab we're going to press the three lines here and press settings for eye blinking lip syncing that should bring up this pop-up where we can select what settings affect eye blinking lip syncing for lip syncing all we want is the parameter that controls the mouth opening and closing and then I don't really care about eye blinking since I tend to bake it in my expression Loops anyway save the model and we'll go back into the animation you can either start with an expression that matches the voice line and duplicate it and add the voice line as a prefix or we can just save it as a new animation from scratch drag and drop in the WAV file and then squash or stretch the animation or duplicate into the length of the expression animation equals The Voice line just a quick side note I'm fairly certain there's a way to layer lip sync animations on top of live 2D animations instead of making a new animation per sound clip rimpai is support for expression files on top of motion files but I'm not sure how to get all of that to add up to a labor-saving way to apply lip sync to stuff but for now this is what I know will work once our animation matches the audio link we'll go into the animation menu up here press track and select apply lip sync from audio file that brings up this pop-up and we can select the model and the audio clip you're using for the scene and now if you go into this scene you'll see there are two tabs above live 2D parameters blink and lip sync play the animation hit punch I whip out my little military tear gas can the paralyzer and squirting I never used that yet had no cost and you can see how it roughly aligns with the audio the volume value is set by the volume of the audio but you adjust and Cutie's values below to change it up the scale is how much the parameter is multiplied by so if you need them there's subtle motions between each mouth movement you'll want to bring the scale down a little bit so let's bring it down to one point oh hit punch I whip out my little all right and that's looking a lot better I like to adjust this at the beginning until the lip syncs Peaks and valleys look about right default value is the closed mouth value usually the lowest value of the parameter and then effect is a percentage applied to the entire lip sync if the character is Whispering you can bring this value down but in normal volume you can bring this up if they're shouting you can bring the scale up so the mouth will tend to be open more often let's try this at 50 and just kind of see what happens military tear gas can the paralyzer and score it let's open the teeth a bit more to make that lip sync look a little more natural and maybe give it more of an expression and after a few minutes of work you can get an idea of how far we can get with live 2DS native lip sync tools but let's say we wanted to get a bit more robust with the lip sync for that we can do it by hand generally these are the mouth shapes you want to match to different audio sounds a wide open ah mouth for A's and eyes a slightly less open mouth for e and l a thin tooth looking mouth for F's and V's a closed wide mouth for M's B's or P's and then some pursed looking mouth shapes for o u W's and q's I used to do lip syncing a lot for games and it took a while to get used to it but eventually it got good enough to do this by ear even for languages I don't understand so with the lip sync if anything doesn't look right from the Audio I know it's change the teeth might need to be a bit more apart or together the mouth more closed or for O's use W's and q's we'll want to purse the lips more and this is what that'll look like hit punch I whip out my little military tear gas can the paralyzer and squirting now the lip sync by hand looks a lot better but it takes way more time so it's important to recognize when you want to use those automated lip syncing systems versus spending a little bit more time to adjust those lip syncs on your own but what if you want a custom animation along with the lip sync along the timeline that necessitate pose changes and then give those new pose changes secondary actions like for instance when she's saying no in addition to our head shaking we want her shaking her arm then we'll connect those secondary actions with follow-through movements like for the shaking arm if you look in the timeline you can see that the hand is rotating slightly behind the arm and then the bending of the hand is bending slightly behind the rotation of the arm this gives it a very smooth organic motion now let's see the full animation in action hit punch I whip out my little military tear gas can the paralyzer and scored it I never used that yet had no cost now that we have all our animations done let's export in the model mode we'll go to file export for run time and then export is a DOT Moc file the important setting here is that export version for right now renpai can only read live 2D files with software developer kit AKA SDK 4.0 for cubism there's certain features in later versions that can't be used for 4.0 but don't worry about those for now press ok and pick a file to export this to I like to right click make a new folder and then name the new character double click that new folder then save in that folder you'll now see a few files and a file folder with the texture in there then in the animation mode and make sure you actually click the animation file here we'll go to file export for runtime and then export motion file from here we'll want to Output all scenes and then export that to the same folder we selected before now there will be a new file added per scene name that's export super simple now for the renpai part take the folder that you made and put it in the game folder I like to put it in the images folder since it's basically going to be treated like an image from here on out in your script.rpy file or whatever dot rpy file you want to use to define images will Define our live 2D character you'll use image plus whatever you want the character to be named and then you're going to equal it to live 2D the capital L and capital D does make a difference there so make sure you match that syntax and then in parentheses put in quotes the location of the folder with those live 2D files in it so in this case Images slash Punk and then close the parentheses I like to also add in a comma followed by default underscore fade equals 0.0 and then another comma and then Loop equals true the default fade line keeps live 2D from fading from one animation to the other since I have some parameters that can look kind of wonky when it fades between them I like to turn this off but if you're restrained with how you design your characters you can maybe get away with it then Loop equals true makes the animation Loop useful for Expressions that Loop otherwise the character will just stop when the animation ends to place the character in a scene show the character name we defined and then follow with any expression from our motion files in that folder using the motion file name itself in this case very underscore angry there we go easy peasy I can even use the action editor a renpai plugin you should all be using by now to adjust the image itself and grab and apply those settings right in renpai that being said if we want to make changes to all the Live 2 3D animations there are a few more elements to the image statement that we can adjust automatically the live 2D files scale to match the height of the game but if we wanted to override that we'd use the zoom argument type in Zoom equals 1.0 which is the default and wow that's the actual size of those character sprites but go to zoom 0.25 and it's closer to the default character scaling that renpai does the rimpai documentation recommends using the top base and height arguments to adjust the character's positions first use the base parameter to adjust where the animation is lined up with the bottom of the screen so we'll adjust that to base 1.2 and the characters moved up a little bit but set it to 0.8 and now they're scaled and positioned a little bit lower on the screen now if you think this image is too big you can reduce the height down from 1.0 until it's the right size so that made it a little bit smaller and if the image is too small increase top from 0.0 to a larger size to reduce the amount of blank space above the animation in General Zoom overrides bass top and height so Choose Wisely between automatic scaling and manual scaling if you put multiple motions one after another in the same line the character will swap between then sequence from left to right with the last motion being looped if Loop is set for True on this character it could be a little jarring if you go from one extreme pose to another but if we want to have the character speak a line and then switch to the idle it's perfect if you want to have a character stop moving after an animation is done but without the loop equals false code in the character definition you can add the attributes still at the end of sequence and that should stop all motion for that character by switching back to the default pose not super useful but something to keep in mind as I've mentioned before rempi has support for expression changes but these really shouldn't be used for actual expression changes again the benefit of live 2D is we can make a bunch of poses that should be used in conjunction with the facial expressions of the character to help the viewer see the difference in expressiveness so for Expressions I'd recommend using them for anything one-off that you just don't want to make a bunch of custom animations for so let's say there's a section of your game where all the characters eyes are closed for some reason in this case you can go right into the cubism viewer a separate application for live 2D that should be in your applications folder select it open it and then put in the dot moc3 file you exported for your character drag and drop it here and now you can add a new expression here fill out its name and then select that new expression in the Expressions folder down below you can see all the parameters of your character in this case we'll go with il blink and i r blink set them so they're closed and then export that expression in renpai you can add that expression as an attribute and now that should override any keyframes where it calls for eye blinks alternatively you could use expressions for some minor costume changes say I want an expression where I turn the choker on the character off I'll go into live 2D add an attribute that changes the opacity of the choker pieces and then re-export that model file then back in the cubism viewer I'll make a new expression choker off that changes that parameter so it goes from the choker being visible to being invisible now I'll export that expression and now in renpai when I set that expression you can see the choker is removed you may have noticed that when I use one expression it's overridden by the next one that I use currently renpai has a designation between exclusive and non-exclusive expressions that should allow multiple Expressions to be used at once but let's not worry about that because then we're dealing with animation layering and again I'm gonna make a whole separate video about Expressions later on if you have animations where you have multiple different key items you want toggled on and off just make separate animations for them in live 2D it's going to be way easier for you to debug so that's all you need to integrate a live 2D character in a renpai and now for some live 2D applications that you might not have thought of Ren Pai UI you are so hard to program custom buttons that need custom transforms if you want them to have any sort of motion if only there was a better way so what if we went into live 2D and created animations for each of these button States now we can make complicated looking animated buttons in live 2D with relative ease for this I'll make a button and plan out a few different interactions an idle a hover a press State and a disabled state so first in live 2D I'll go ahead and set up a few parameters that can give me some control over this button I'll make one parameter that'll just make it disabled another parameter that just makes the play icon bigger smaller another parameter where I make the total size of the button big or small and finally another parameter where I can just rotate the button a little bit then putting these together the idle I'll just make a subtle little pulsing animation with the play icon the hover state where your mouse is actually hovering over it I'll make something a little bit more active in pulsing to show this is the thing I'm interacting with and then the Press state which is just one animation that's going to play when you actually press it so we want a little depression and then make it get suddenly big before we get back to the idle stator in this case actually play the game then I export everything now in renpai I can define those live 2D animations and then Define the individual button states on the screen under image button here for idle I'll use button idle for hover I'll use button hover and that's the live 2D figure here and idle is the motion file and then in the actual game you can see that the idle is playing and then when I hover the hover animation plays there obviously you can make button animations that are a lot more complicated than I showed here with the general structure should be the same kind of no matter what you're doing plus you can embellish anything on screen with another little trick screen overlays effects and VFX if you buy these things online you'll usually get frame by frame pngs but I like to make a few general effects then create quick animations that I can apply wherever I want you can also make simple animations to throw in text for instance I want a little emoji that animates while it's in the text line I'll make a new live 2D image and in canvas settings I'll set the size to be pretty small let's say 200 pixels squared and then I'll take an emoji I'll model it animated to jump export it and in renpai I'll Define the live 2D animation make it a little bit smaller and then throw it in a line of text using the image tag there now I have a little jumping Emoji right in the text there now how about I don't know animated backgrounds you can make backgrounds in multiple layers and animate the different states in live 2D now you have an animated Parallax background I did something similar to this for my short visual novel phantomas where I could only use one background image but imagine how crazy you can get with the background of an amusement park with a ferris wheel rotating behind the characters or an ocean scene with the trees swaying and the waves crashing against the beach really if there's a any reason at all you want to add some motion or movement to your visual novel and you want robust animation engine to make those things faster and easier life 2D is a great solution but obviously sometimes you still need to program and if you saw the action editor I was using earlier in the video and you're like what is that you can check out this video right here probably aiming at the right spot or if you want some more techniques to make your animation pop try this video out right here expect some more smaller videos in the future this was a a lot more work than I was intending if you have any requests on future videos on I don't know more features of live 2D or anything about the game production process just be sure to leave a comment below and most importantly just keep making games

Channel: Visual Novel Design

Views: 19,097

Keywords: renpy, visual novel, live2d, animation, live2d cubism tutorial for beginners, live2d cubism, live2d visual novel, rigging, modeling, vndev, skeletal animation, bone and mesh animation, renpy for beginners, renpy guide, renpy tutorial

Id: xwW8Plpz1RQ

Length: 72min 14sec (4334 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2023