Heyo, so over a year ago I made a blog post about an original character I designed in VRoid and also talked about how cool VRoid is. In that blog post I mentioned a character I made which wasn't finished, which I called C1. Well, after so so long I finally got around to finishing C1, and I got a thumbs up from some mutuals on the design, so it's now ready to show to the world. So here it is, the LiterallyHifumi site mascot:

I have not put a ton of elbow grease into making this character, but my idea for it has been around since 2021, most of the VRoid stuff I did in 2022, and only recently did I actually get around to finishing the final details that needed work. This is not the character design I would have made if I didn't have to deal with the limitations of VRoid and my own drawing skill, but perfect is the enemy of done and all that. Maybe in the future I will have like a V1.5 design where all the elements of the character design I originally wanted will be put into reality.

It's been so long since I originally thought of this design, and I don't completely remember all the reasoning why this character looks like it does. Black with yellow highlights is one of my favourite colour schemes, and that's what the colour palette revolves around. The clothing/style choices are just random things I thought were attractive and/or interesting all put into one character. This might sound kind of odd, but one of the things I thought about when designing my character was making it so that if someone were to cosplay this character it wouldn't be too challenging to pull off. That's part of why the hair and eye colours are natural, and the clothing doesn't look too exotic or anything.

I'm aware of most of the things that make a good character design like colour palette, silhouette, etc. and I tried to make sure my character design would have that taken into account. Unfortunately this VRoid-based character sheet isn't a proper character sheet that shows the silhoutette properly, but that is something that isn't hard to fix.

One funny thing I noticed is that the rules of character design aren't all that different from the rules of designing a logo and brand identity. Good logos are supposed to have a simple recognizable shape that can be noticed in greyscale (or just pure black and white), and brands usually have a colour palette that they use everywhere to stand out. The rules of character design are basically similar with stand out colour palettes that work in greyscale along with recognizable silhouettes being recommended.

I also recently watched a "vtuber design rules" video and apparently one of the rules is that the top-half of the character is where all the interesting & recognizable bits are supposed to be in (because that's the part of the character always visible when doing a video or a stream). But it kind of gave off the vibe that somehow the parts that are outside the top-half are somehow unimportant and shouldn't have a lot of effort put into it. I think my character looks totally fine with just the top-half visible, but I didn't really know about this rule before, and designed everything such that (mostly) any part can be isolated and people could recognize who this character is.

The hair is all VRoid presets, however much of my character's clothing design is mostly my original idea. I have to give full credit to this image for giving me the inspiration for the off-shoulder top. The heart belt on the cuffed shorts with button tabs also wasn't my original idea, but I did look it up instead randomly coming across it. On the back, there's a tattoo of my LH logo on it so the back looks interesting to look at. The decision to have a sole design on the boots was inspired by KAFU's character sheet, but the story for why I decided to make it look cute but also be kind of a practical design that looks like it has good traction is its own thing...

I have a family member that I used to live with who owned these cute sheepskin boots. And every morning after an overnight snowfall when I left the house to walk to school, I would see the cute footprints left by the cute sole pattern of those boots on our walkway. Don't know why, but this memory evokes such a strong feeling of nostalgia in me. The design their boot soles had isn't the same as the soles my character has, but the beautiful mix of form and function that the soles of those boots is the inspiration for my character's boot design.

That's all about the design of my character. For the time being this is just a mascot for this website, but in the future I'm thinking of doing vtuber stuff with this character. I probably need to go get an iPhone with FaceID so I can do ARKit tracking stuff before I can do that. But this is just an idea right now, not sure how soon I can get that set up.

What are your thoughts? Do you have your own 'sona character or want to make one?