Bit of an old pic by now, but still like it. Teikkiet is pretty much my comfort OC and I doodle her often when I need to cheer up. She likes hugs~

I built my little rig myself, so I know all of its little secrets, and things I want to change in a V2 model!

The first thing I'd mention is I get a lot of folks that are real surprised that it's not a 3D model and it just isn't! It's all 2D assets

So first and foremost I get a lot of people asking "How long is Wobbly?" and the answer to that is this long. I've actually had to stretch him because I moved from PRPR Live to Vtube Studio and VTube Studio allows for scaling the model due to facial proximity. So I can lean in and out from the screen. So I had to give him a longer neck to accommodate.

After that, there's my favorite bit of rigging trivia. While I was setting up keyformers, I realized that snakes don't have eyelids, and that I could treat the model much less like a direct representation of a face, and much more like a fun Puppet with custom controls. So blink functions are tied to eyes being opened and closed. I use the auto-blink functionality of various vtube software to make Wobbly do that little snake tongue thing where he does sniffs. PRPR Live allowed me to disable direct eye tracking, but Vtube studio doesn't and wobbly's tongue hangs out sometimes now. Which isn't the end of the world but eh.

After that there was the question of making a face that isn't human be more expressive, and I decided to lean into eye shapes. Which I will be leaning much harder into when I start working on an earnest V2 model. Right now the extremes simply are not extreme enough, but there's a little bit of shading on the under-face-bits that needs to be reworked and remorphed to get that greater expression without fully breaking believablility. I do love his sinister little garlic clove eye shapes when he gets the furrowed brow though.

And one of the last little bits that I'm really proud of is the way that I've interwoven the parts. There's a large amount of larger pieces that are overlapping in ways that carefully maintain the silhouette. Pictured here the little cheek blushies cover over where the snoot melds into the rest of the head shape. So you have the dimensionality of the highlights shifting around as the head re-angles, selling the depth of the snoot. The blushies hide where the seams would be visible, and allow for a clean transition between a lot of more extreme angles. The eyes ride similarly above those shapes and deform inside of a space that is covered in a more saturated orange shadow. By keeping that shadow there it gives the brows a kind of prominence whenever the edges of the eyes tuck away, helping offset them from the rest of the design.

The Good model and attention to controls doesn't make the entire stream though. I've gone through and found a way to use StreamUp's Source Clones and a few blending modes to allow the live sources in my OBS windows to create dynamic lighting effects like are pictured here.

The lighting is two pronged, having both a large light that covers the background of the scene, and also a smaller sub-source that exclusively overlays onto the model. The difference in lighting effects helps sell the idea that wobbly is offset from the background. Lights in the center of the screen like gun muzzle flashes will light up his snoot, and things on the edges tend to show up on the stream layout. In this particular screenshot you can just make out where the top eye of the funny face I drew is lighting up the corner of the pompadour.

Oh! And pixel wobbly! Last one because this post is long and I could go forever because doing this kind of Stream FX work is super fun to me.

So pixel wobbly is 100% dynamic! I scale him down 5x, sharpen him, and then scale him back up to the basic canvas resolution of the sub-scene that I import him from. So it gives him those nice crunch edges. Then, I'll take a LUT, put it into Aseprite, and restrict the LUT to the color palette of whatever console we're playing a retro game from. Sometimes I'll even disable sharpening or blur him a little so that he matches whatever fucked up N64 textures we'll be seeing. I super love getting to play with him like this so we play a lot of retro games.

The window that holds the retro games is also the only thing in the stream space that I didn't build 100%. Some folks might notice that it's built of the snake body parts from Megaman's Snake Man stage. I stitched them together to make a little stage to play our retro games on. I've then also hit them with a posterizing LUT so that the lighting cast from the game masks also has a chunky feel to it.

So far as the "OC" nature of Wobbly, I consider him kind of like my Kermit. He's a little showrunner who's willing to chase folks around to ensure that the show runs smooth, but he has no consistent crew or cast and is mostly just trying to keep himself fun and relevant without compromising on generally trying to be a good guy. It's showbiz. He probably has cute stickers on his clipboard that he looks at to stay motivated.

I try not to be overworked or tired sounding on stream but as you can see I do a lot of stuff to make the stream work! I don't have a budget to pay folks to figure this stuff out for me so I'm very proud of the things that I do string together into a working show! So thank you for asking!! I tell all the patrons that there's a lot of kind of invisible work that goes into putting on the stream and here's just a little fraction of it. Behind the scenes I'm working on some sketches, and thinking really hard about how I can make a newer Wobbly that has more detail. I want to have some visible scales, better brow deformations, a more legible pompadour, and all manner of readability things. The big issue is just making the time for it when I also have to put out a consistent body of work to appease the keymailer/twitch gods.

I'm also studying improv techniques and absorb a lot of live comedy thanks to Youtube and the rest of my friends on Twitch. I really get a lot of mileage out of working with more established streamers and broadcasters. authorblues in particular is a great place to work because (Unknown to him even) he's excellent at yes-anding a bit. I'd really love to assemble a crew of folks that do solid improv, and try doing some one-shot tabletop things. You think it's hard getting non-streamer friends to read some rulebooks, make characters, and show up consistently to an event that isn't being broadcast to an audience that will judge them? Hoofadoofa.

If folks have questions about how to get some of this stuff working in OBS without streamFX I've made another post about it somewhere back along my feed that I'm too lazy to go find. But you can find it! I believe in you!

A friendly alien in watercolor. Painted in 2018.

A few older pieces from 2015. Why, yes, I do like Watership Down.