Twitch Channel | Kip Mcdonald

KipTries

Twitch was something I started doing for myself about 2 years ago. As someone starting out with no money, all of my assets and layouts had to come from me. Even now that I would be able to commission work, I find the challenge of designing for myself far more satisfying. To see all my old assets check here.

The Models

When I redid my twitch channel, I knew I no longer wanted to use a window with a face camera. This left me a few options but ultimately, I decided to learn how to make and rig what's called a vtuber model. This model essentially is able to track how I move and translate it into this avatar.

However, when I don't use my animated avatar, I use a simpler PNG model that just has an idle and active frame for when I talk. This is voice activated and is only the frog character I use.

When you design and rig a vtube model, its important to keep in mind everything you want to move separately. Things that move independently from each other all need their own meshes and thus need their own layer. For this model, everything from the eyelashes to glasses shine exist by themselves.

Scene Backgrounds + Overlays

When you design a stream, one of the things to consider are what scenes you want to incorporate. Scenes are essentially the different displays you can have while you are live. These are some backgrounds and overlays I have designed and used for this purpose.

These kinds of assets are used for decoration but also to cover important pieces of information like game IDs or live game maps!

These are the current backgrounds I use for my 'Just Chatting' scene as well as the background for a few game scenes.

Animated Scenes + Transitions

After exploring different streams and what those streamers were using to add interest to their layouts, I decided I wanted to explore animated assets. Creating scenes for starting, ending, etc. gives a much more finished feeling.

Emotes + Badges

At a certain point while streaming you begin to unlock different features for your viewers to take advantage of. Some of these features being emotes to use in chat and subscriber badges to show sub status (i.e. how long someone has been subscribed). When you design these yourself, you learn to be conscious of sizing requirements and the level of detail that gets communicated when you size something down so much.

This is an animated emote!

Animated emotes are a fun way for viewers to interact with stream and react to things happening live. Since they are typically a subscriber exclusive, it is also a good way for subs to show off their status.