I don't have much artistic talent. VRChat avatars are mostly just taking the work of Japanese artists and adapting it to work. There are thousands of really nice models out there, mostly made by fans, of just about every anime character ever.
The program they are made for is called Miku Miku Dance. I think it is a free program made by Yamaha to go with the vocaloid singing software they made years ago. I'm not sure if Yamaha came up with the personifications of the various voices the program uses or if the fans did, but Hatsune Miku is a household name in Japan.
Aside from making music videos, some use it to make, to the surprise of nobody, erotic stuff! So quite a few of the models have very very very detailed anatomy with lots of animations to go with the parts.
The model I'm doing for the streamer is tricky because there were only maybe 2 or 3 models created, and all the download links were taken down. I ended up finding characters with similarities and frankensteining it together.
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I'm not really sure what show the face is from, the model is Uni something, but the body is from a model of Anchovy from girls und panzer, and the hair is from the toho girl with the sword konpaku or something?
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The character he wanted is named Tobiichi Origami from a show called "Date A Live" which I don't know much of anything about. Not sure if it is a show based on a dating game, or the other way around, but she's often in some kind of mecha suit thing.
The main differences I still need to work on is the shape of the upper eyes. And really that is the primary distinguishing factor from girl to girl to girl in the animu world. Origami has a sort of 3 step faceted shape to the upper eye. It is tricky to change because you have to change all of the shape key animations as well for facial expressions and talking and such.
Outfits get tricksy as well because VRChat has a limit of 20k triangles. People will often use decimation to reduce triangles, but it inevitably leaves cracks and holes in the model and bits get misshapen and animate poorly. The proper way to reduce polygons is to do a retopology, but it is very time consuming.
For the above, I didn't want to do either. The body and hair were already near 20k, and the streamer really likes solid white and solid black clothing, so I knew I could get away with very low resolution for the hoodie and boots. So I just made them myself from scratch, and they turned out really well.
Being a coder I can write custom shaders for whatever needs it. The hoodie is a modification of the standard Unity smoothness / metallic approach, but with a bit of minneart shading to give it a velvety look, and double sided so it kind of doubles as a skirt down low. There's just panties under there, no shorts or anything.
