Oohhh yeah, that's some good know-how, right there! Thank you for this excellent comment! The 'vrchat+' tip is huge tho, that's absolutely going to be a deep wellspring, indeed.
Re: the reference art: it's quite hard for me to wing it from the jump; part of the ease of a lot of beginner tutorials (as with the friendly frog tutorial you linked), is that the front/profile reference art is key to a majority of the actual model itself, and that process is something I definitely know I could work with and do. Winging it off of angled art, however? Big unknown. The obstacle of getting actual, good art, is, indeed, bigger than the obstacle of kinda winging it myself, but both are big enough to stop me. I DO have a plan, however, to kinda get me there on both counts - applicable reference imagery and beginner skills:
I intend to use something like HeroForge to get some stock standard t-pose shapes of a generic model that's close to what I'm after, and once I've put the time into basically recreating that as my own model, I should be familiar enough with the standard toolset to start making changes on the fly - change or add elements I want from other references, etc.
Do you have thoughts (and/or opinions?) on software? I'm leaning toward Blender, for that combo of free, deep-if-you-start-digging, and able to do a majority of what I'm after (AFAIK), but I've also got my piece of eight, so I have options.
